Bulletin

The North American Paul Tillich Society

Volume XLIV, Number 2 Spring 2018
Editor: Frederick J. Parrella, Secretary-Treasurer
Religious Studies Department, Santa Clara University
Kenna Hall, Suite 300, Room H, Santa Clara, California 95053
Associate Editor: Jonathan Rothchild, Loyola Marymount University
Assistant to the Editor: Vicky Gonzalez, Santa Clara University
Telephone: 408.554.4714 or 408.554.4547
FAX: 408.554.2387 Email: fparrella@scu.edu
Web: www.NAPTS.org/Webmeister: Michael Burch, San Rafael, California
___________________________________________________________________________

In this issue:

❏ Erratum
❏ New Publications
❏ Call for Papers: NAPTS 2018/ November 16-17, 2018, Denver, by Verna Ehret
❏ “Why Tillich? Why Now? A Publishing Opportunity” by Tom Bandy and Mercer Press
❏ “Tillich’s Lovechild” by Robert Cummings Neville, with a Prefatory Comment by
Lawrence A. Whitney
❏ Responses to “Tillich’s Lovechild” by Sharon Peebles Burch and Wesley Wildman.
❏ “Power as Basic Element of Analysis for Theological Response to Fascism—A Study
of Paul Tillich’s Concept of the Demonic and the Religious Symbols of the Kingdom
of God and the Spiritual Presence and Their Implications for Understanding the
World Politics Today” by Ho Siu Pun
❏ “Tillich on the Dynamics of the Divine Life: Evasive or Earnest” by Marc A. Pugliese

Erratum • Editor’s Note: Humble Apologies for the error

in the text! Presbyopia is setting in.
• From Damian Wheeler, whose paper appeared in
the Winter issue of the Bulletin:
Please send your papers on Tillich for publi-
“I wanted to point out one fairly significant error. cation in the Bulletin of the NAPTS to:
On p. 29, it seems as though you unintentionally fparrella@scu.edu
added an endnote from one of the other papers.
Endnote #61 should be the reference to Spinoza You are helping to keep Tillich scholarship
and Corrington (the correct note is currently noted alive and adapt it to new generations of
“61616161”). And the note that begins “Reading scholars.
well beyond this propaedeutic’ should be deleted.”
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
New Publications
Shearn, Samuel. Returning to Tillich. Theology and Leg-
acy in Transition. Tillich Research 13. Ber-
lin/New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2018.
Price, Robert M., ed. The Ground of Being: Neglected
Essays of Paul Tillich, with an Introduction by
Thomas J. J. Altizer. Selma, NC: Mindvendor,
2015.
Call for Papers NAPTS 2018
November 16-17, 2018, Denver,
Colorado
P lease send abstracts to Verna Ehret at
vehret@mercyhurst.edu by April 30, 2018.
Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and
submitted in an email attachment either in Mi-
crosoft Word or PDF format.
1. Veterans Visioning Panel
• This panel will be a roundtable discussion of
not only the history of the Society, but also the role
of Tillich scholarship in a wide range of contempo-
rary issues. The moderator will provide the panel-
ists with a set of pre-written questions developed
in conversation with the panelists. We are looking
for people who could speak to contemporary de-
velopments and challenges in theology, ethics, cul-
ture, social and political life, etc., and who also have
a history of participation in the Society. The panel
could include people with a breadth of knowledge
of Tillich as well as people who have specialized in
particular areas. The panelists will be invited to par-
ticipate, but if you know of someone you think
should be on this panel or would like to nominate
yourself, please send those recommendations to
Verna.
2. Book Panel Paul Tillich and Asian Reli-
gions
• Review panel on Paul Tillich and Asian Religions,
a new edited volume from DeGruyter. This panel
will be made up of invited panelists. We are cur-
rently working on the presenters, but if you have
any recommendations, please send them to Verna.
2
Tillich Fellows Panel
• There is a separate CFP for this panel with an
earlier submission date.
3. Thinking with Tillich about Contemporary
Society
• The NAPTS seeks to promote contemporary
scholarship on the work of Paul Tillich. In this
year’s meeting we are looking at the past, present,
and future of Tillich studies. This open call for pa-
pers focuses on the ways current scholarship thinks
through and with Tillich. We invite proposals that
engage Tillich’s work and intellectual tools in the
study of nationalism, quasi-religion, trans-religious
theology, or social and creative justice.
Why Tillich? Why Now?
A Publishing Opportunity
Tom Bandy
And Mercer Press
M
ercer Press has invited me to gather and edit
a volume on Tillich’s continuing influence
on contemporary experience and culture.
This is an invitation to participants in all Tillich So-
cieties, and any student or professional interested
in Tillich’s impact on culture, to contribute articles.
The purpose of the book is to explore how Tillich’s
ideas and methodologies have been applied to is-
sues and ideas, groups and movements, profes-
sions and sectors, and other cultural experiences
and developments. We are particularly interested
how Tillich’s work is being used and adapted by
leaders for other disciplines, and to enhance dia-
logue between religion and culture.
We hope that this volume can be released in time
for the AAR/NAPTS annual meetings in 2019.
Please send your proposals to me
(tgbandy33@gmail.com) by the end of June 2018.
Proposals should be 1 – 2 pages. These will be re-
viewed by Sharon Burch, Mary Ann Stenger, Fred
Parrella, and myself. Once proposals are accepted,
articles will need to be limited to 5000-6000 words
(English only). The deadline for completed articles
will be Dec. 31, 2018.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
This invitation is being sent about the same time as
the usual call for papers for the AAR/NAPTS an-
nual meetings since it is possible that articles and
papers might overlap. The idea for this book orig-
inally surfaced from informal conversations be-
tween Mercer Press editors and Sharon Burch,
Mary Ann Stenger, Fred Parrella, and myself. Mer-
cer Press has assured me that they will certainly
grant permission for any article to be used in a fu-
ture publication by the author as long as she or he
cites the original use.
We are all quite excited about this project that fo-
cuses on Tillich’s broader impact in culture, and
hope that you will consider contributing to its suc-
cess.
If you have questions, please feel free to communi-
cate directly with me. And thank you for consider-
ing a contribution, or forwarding this invitation to
a colleague that might be interested in publishing
an article in this area.
Dr. Thomas G. Bandy
TGBandy33@gmail.com
Tillich’s Lovechild
Robert Cummings Neville
Prefatory Comment by Lawrence A. Whitney,
LC†
The executive board of the North American Paul
Tillich Society invited Robert Cummings Neville
to reflect on the influence of Tillich on his own
theological project at the November 2017 meeting
of the North American Paul Tillich Society in Bos-
ton prior to the Meeting of the American Academy
of Religion.1 (My personal thanks to Benjamin J.
Chicka for having stepped in to moderate the con-
versation at the meeting when I was called away
last minute). The paper below resulted from that
invitation and was delivered to a packed hall with
responses from Sharon Peebles Burch and Wesley
J. Wildman, also below. As the paper and re-
sponses demonstrate, there remains a great deal at
stake philosophically, theologically, and practically
3
for the Tillichian approach, and a wide range of op-
portunities for us who take inspiration from Tillich
to develop, expand, and improve his insights. Of
particular interest from the paper are the ways in
which Neville develops Tillich to be more philo-
sophically rigorous and robust, and drastically ex-
pands on the interreligious engagement Tillich em-
barked upon later in life. In the responses, Burch
reflects on the intertwined theological and practical
impact of Tillichian (and Nevillean) imminence by
contrast with absolutized (Barthian) transcend-
ence, and Wildman provides an honest and hu-
mane assessment of Tillich’s relational entangle-
ments in life, and from heaven, with Neville.
Introduction
Nancy Frankenberry once wrote, in a referee’s
letter for a volume of my Philosophical Theology tril-
ogy, that I am a “lovechild of Paul Tillich and Al-
fred North Whitehead.” Whereas I am not sure
about the biology of this, I am deeply flattered by
her intellectual genetics. Today I want to talk about
the first half of that parentage, discussing four
main topics: God as Ultimate and the Ground of
Being, broken symbols, ultimate concern and the
human predicament, and the public and systematic
form for philosophical theology.
First, however, I want to say some personal
things about Tillich and his influence on me. As an
undergraduate and graduate student, I was an as-
sistant for Professor John E. Smith at Yale, mainly
his typist, sometimes his baby sitter, and also his
bar tender at big parties when I reached the legal
age of twenty-one.2 Smith himself had been a stu-
dent and assistant for Tillich at Union Seminary. So
when Tillich came to Yale to preach in the univer-
sity chapel, Smith gave after-church luncheon par-
ties for him at which I tended bar. Tillich was an
astonishing preacher. People jammed the aisles and
listened intently as he spoke slowly in his deep Ger-
man accent. He was exhausted after preaching and
loved to relax at the luncheon parties, drinking co-
pious amounts of Scotch, neat. After one of these,
when the guests had gone home and he surely
wanted more than anything to be napping, he
walked with me around Smith’s backyard listening
to me talk about my dissertation proposal on Duns
Scotus’s theory of creation. He said to me, “Yes,
Scotus understoood zee freedom of zee Grount of
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Peing.” What I remember most, however, was his
kindness to a feckless graduate student.
When I was a sophomore, I went through the
existential crisis of deciding that my adolescent re-
ligion of liberal Missouri Methodism, Norman Vin-
cent Peale piety, and Warner Sallman high culture
was hopeless. How was it possible to sustain relig-
iosity of any sort, let alone some kind of Christian-
ity, and also be a sophisticated educated person?
Of course, sophomore year is the most sophisti-
cated time of anyone’s life, and I bet most of you
had a similar crisis. But then John Smith gave me
Tillich’s The Courage to Be and it saved my life.3 Not
just religion, but my very acceptance of my exist-
ence. Tillich taught me that you could not be a so-
phisticated, educated, person without being reli-
gious. That set me on the quest of finding out how
best to be religious, which is what my Philosophical
Theology trilogy is all about.4 Through Smith, Tillich
was my intellectual grandfather, and through his
writings he was my intellectual father, or at least
one of them.
When I was about thirty-five, I was struggling
to figure out who my philosophical audience was,
who I was writing for. I was not part of any estab-
lished philosophical or theological project. So, I de-
cided to write for Paul Tillich in heaven, and that
has guided my writing ever since. True, I have had
to suppose that Tillich spent a lot of heavenly time
learning world religions and American philosophy,
but I will argue shortly that this is just what he
would have done had he continued to live on until
this day in pre-heavenly circumstances.
For nearly thirty years at Boston University I
have taught a cycle of three courses in advanced
systematic theology following the outline of Til-
lich’s Systematic Theology.5 The first course deals with
methodological issues and conceptions of God or
ultimacy. The second deals with the human condi-
tion, including fundamental predicaments and
ways of existentially determining personal identity.
The third deals with living religiously, conceptions
of God with us or the Holy Spirit, ecclesiology, and
the nature of religion. Although the reading list has
changed every year, Tillich’s Systematic Theology has
always been on it, one volume per course. My Phil-
osophical Theology trilogy arose out of that course and
follows Tillich’s order. The apples do not fall far
from the tree.
4
God as Ultimate and Ground of Being
Tillich is known as a philosophical theologian,
a title I have appropriated and which is usually un-
derstood to be in contrast to Karl Barth who was a
narrative biblical and confessional theologian. In
the broad framing contexts for theology, the phil-
osophical frame says that the basic orientation is
how God is related to the world and how people
are related in the world to God. The narrative
frame says that theology takes place in understand-
ing God’s agency in a story of creating, redeeming,
and fulfilling a divine purpose; God’s agency for
Barth is in the cosmic and human person of Jesus
Christ. At least this is Barth’s Christian narrative,
and it has little place for alternative narratives from
Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Daoism, Hindu-
isms and other religions, except insofar as they fit
in to the Christian story. Save for Judaism, which
Barth does fit into the Christian story, and Islam,
most other religions do not have strong narrative
theology traditions, but rather philosophical ones.
Part of the significance of Tillich’s being a phil-
osophical theologian is that he was able to treat al-
ternatives to Christian conceptions of God by anal-
ogy according to his category of ultimacy. He
treated the Chinese Dao , Heaven, and Great Ulti-
mate, the Hindu Brahman in various versions, and
Buddhist Emptiness, also in various versions, as
symbols of ultimate reality alongside equally sym-
bolic Christian, Jewish, and Muslim conceptions of
God, including sophisticated Platonic, Aristotelian,
and Neo-Platonic conceptions. Although Tillich
was not the first to use the category of ultimacy in
comparing religious ideas, I take his deployment of
that category as a universal comparative category
for recognizing what counts as religion to be one
of his most important contributions to the study of
religion and to philosophical theology. This kind of
comparative thinking is not possible for a theolo-
gian fundamentally oriented to a singular cosmic
narrative.
Nevertheless, an important limit exists in Til-
lich’s practice as a philosophical theologian. He
distinguished philosophy from theology by saying
that, whereas philosophy examines the basic and
pervasive structures of existence, theology is ori-
ented to how those structures define human life in
its ultimate dimensions.6 In this sense, he deliber-
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
ately chose to be a theologian in the Systematic The-
ology. To be sure, he was extraordinarily well edu-
cated in the history of philosophy, especially that
of the Greeks, the mystics, and the German Ideal-
ists such as Hegel and Schelling. To read just about
any of his works, including A History of Christian
Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Exis-
tentialism, is to receive an extraordinary education in
the history of Western philosophy as well as theol-
ogy.7 He treated most of the Christian theologians
as philosophical theologians. A consequence of his
distinction between philosophy and theology and
choice to be the latter is that he did not pursue the
philosophical side deeply enough for his theology,
to my mind. You understand that the fact that all
my degrees are in philosophy and none in theology
does not bias this judgment in the slightest.
The first place his philosophical theology
lacked philosophical depth is in his conception of
God as Ground of Being. I thoroughly approve of
his rejection of any conception of God as a being,
either a supernaturalistic one or a supranaturalistic
one.8 I also approve of his placing of the dialectic
about God in the conversation that treats God as
Being-itself in some sense, a conversation with Au-
gustine and Thomas Aquinas as well as German
Idealists. All conceptions of God as a being need
to be treated as broken symbols, a point to which
I shall return. This point holds for all the other ma-
jor symbols of the ultimate such as Dao, Heaven,
Great Ultimate, Brahman, and Emptiness: all are
broken symbols. A second motive Tillich had for
calling God the Ground of Being was that, for him,
God could only be a worthy object of ultimate con-
cern, and no being could be such a worthy object.
I share this motive.
Nevertheless, Tillich did not say much about
what the Ground of Being is.9 It is the ground of
all finite beings, but more than that. It is also the
Ground of Being-itself as the ontological together-
ness of all the beings. Two significantly different
traditions exist in the West as well as elsewhere to
articulating what this grounding means. One is the
“fullness of being tradition” that says the ground is
infinite being, that finite beings are whittled down
versions of infinite being, and that creation is the
contraction of infinite being into limited instances
of being, the beings, by determination as negation.
Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus, Bonaventure, and
Thomas Aquinas have versions of this fullness of
5
being in God and delimited instances of being in
beings. Most Christian philosophical theologians in
this tradition hail creation ex nihilo in the sense that
there was no pre-existent matter out of which crea-
tures were made; but they also hail creation a deo in
the sense that beings are finite delimitations of in-
finite being or Pure Act of To Be, as Aquinas
would say. The alternative, and minor, tradition
says that the Ground of Being creates everything
positive in beings as completely novel, as not con-
tained within any fullness of the ground itself. Des-
cartes is the major representative in the West of
this view of creation and I hold to it myself.10 This
is super-serious sense of creation ex nihilo. The
Ground of Being is not a something upon which
overflowing or contraction is worked to produce
beings. Rather the ground is the ontological act cre-
ating the beings and including them as its termini.
Without the act creating beings, there is nothing.
No divine nature exists, or essence, or existence, or
potentiality, or transcendental features such as
goodness, beauty, truth, or unity, except as a con-
sequence of the creation. The divine nature con-
sists exclusively in what results from the creation
of the beings. God or the ground is the creator of
whatever is created.11
I have never been able to figure out whether
Tillich interpreted the Ground of Being as the full-
ness of being or as the completely novel ontologi-
cal creation of everything determinate as finite be-
ing. I suspect he did not appreciate the difference
and drew from both when convenient. He avoided
causal language in discussing the grounding, in-
cluding creation language except as rendered highly
symbolic. I will spare you my complex, detailed,
and narcoleptic arguments for the ontological cre-
ative act theory of the Ground of Being.
Because Tillich saw the Ground of Being as the
object of ultimate concern, he knew that it had to
be symbolized somehow as an object for religious
purposes. Hence the necessity in his theology for
broken symbols. The symbols must allow us to
“participate” in the Ground of Being not only as
the object of ultimate concern but as the agent of
our redemption, overcoming estrangement from
the ground of our being. Nevertheless, the ground
cannot be an object in any usual sense, for that
would make it a being or give it characters, how-
ever otherwise infinite or simple. Christianity and
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
other Western religions have taken a model of hu-
man personhood and purified it so as to emphasize
the agency and intentionality of the Ground of Be-
ing. Tillich objected to personifying God in any
way that would make God a being, but did say that
God is beyond personhood and more than per-
sonal, an appeal to the fullness of being tradition.12
He worked hard to revalorize Christian symbols of
the personal God while insisting that God as
Ground of Being is still beyond anything personal.
I think the heart of his position is that human be-
ings become normatively personal in the process
of overcoming estrangement from the Ground of
Being that is not personal at all. Nevertheless, that
ground, for Tillich, needs to be objectified in a
symbol to be the object of human ultimate con-
cern.
I would supplement Tillich’s point by arguing
that there are two other symbolic or metaphorical
traditions for brokenly symbolizing the ontological
creative act that has no nature except for what
comes from creating the beings constituting the
world. The South Asian traditions begin with the
notion of the human person but push it in the di-
rection of pure consciousness, not agency or inten-
tionality. The Hindu traditions in various versions
push from personal consciousness in meditation to
universal Atman to Brahman beyond any qualities
whatsoever, Nirguna Brahman. Buddhist traditions
push from consciousness in meditation to focusing
on the arising and ceasing of items of conscious-
ness to eliminating any substrate of consciousness
whatsoever, emptiness consisting in the suchness
of things; the Madhyamikas go farther than the
Yogacharins in this. For these traditions in diverse
ways, agency, intentionality, desire, and the like are
the bad sources of illusion and bondage, not the
traits to be made infinite in the Ground of Being.
In East Asia, both personal agency and personal
consciousness disappeared early in the symbols for
the ontological Ground of Being. Instead, symbols
of spontaneous emergence were developed and
purified in notions of the Dao, and the creativity of
Heaven and Earth. The emphasis on spontaneity
runs counter to the calm at the center of the con-
sciousness symbology and counter also to the pre-
dictability one might seek in the intentionality and
agency symbology. Tillich would be pleased to
work around these South and East Asian symbolo-
gies, I think.
6
Had Tillich lightened up on the theological lim-
itation to thinking about the Ground of Being only
in theological terms linked to human ultimate con-
cern, I believe he would have harvested important
philosophical fruit in working through what it
means to be the Ground of Being and Ground of
Beings. Freed from human ultimate concern, Til-
lich would have seen that the Ground of Being is
the ground of any kinds of beings whatsoever,
which he would have called, and almost did, any
kinds of determinate things, or determinations of
being. I have talked about “determinations of be-
ing” since my graduate school days and I got that
language from Tillich.
My conclusion about determinateness, the ar-
guments for which I shall also spare you, is that to
be determinate is to be a harmony consisting of
components harmonized, a form in which they are
harmonized, existential location with respect to
every other harmony with respect to which the har-
mony is determinate, and the value of getting these
components together in this form relative to these
other harmonies. Anything whatsoever that is de-
terminate has to have these four traits: form, com-
ponents formed, existential location relative to oth-
ers, and the value of all that. Because there would
be no ontological creative act, no Ground of Being
in my sense, without the actual creation of some
determinate things, these four transcendental traits
of determinateness are cosmologically ultimate,
that is, they obtain as ultimate conditions in any
cosmos whatsoever. This treatment of determi-
nateness is so abstract or metaphysical as to apply
to any cosmos, conceived any way. You might hold
to an Aristotelian cosmos of substances, or a Con-
fucian-Daoist cosmos consisting of changes, both
of which are kinds of harmony. I doubt that Tillich
was influenced by the Chinese yin-yang conception
of the cosmos of changes, but he was much influ-
enced by the sense of cosmic change in German
Idealism, as illustrated in his discussions of life and
spirit in Volume Three of his Systematic Theology. He
was also wedded to the Aristotelian/medieval dis-
tinction between essence and existence, which to
my mind is not very helpful for his account of es-
trangement and reconciliation in Volume Two.
So, I would encourage Tillich listening from
heaven above to acknowledge, from a philosophi-
cal point of view, five ultimates: the ontological ul-
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
timate of the Ground of Being and the four cos-
mological ultimates of form, components formed,
existential location, and achieved value identity.
Shortly I shall argue that, when those five ultimates
are addressed from the human point of view, they
constitute five religious problematics relative to
concern.
What can we now say about the “being” of
which the Ground of Being is ground? The onto-
logical creative act is creative of beings, whatever
they might turn out to be as determinate things.
Nevertheless, the beings are created together
across space and time, and across whatever other
dimensions of determinate reality exist. This onto-
logical togetherness of the earlier and later, proxi-
mate and distant, and all other features of existen-
tial fields, is more than the cosmological ways in
which things determine one another. It is a feature
of the ontological creative act that its terminus is
the ontological togetherness of all determinate har-
monies embracing all determinate and partially in-
determinate changes. Any one harmony thus has
both ontological depth because it is part of the on-
tological creative act and ontological breadth be-
cause it is together with, and partly defined by, all
the other things within the ontological together-
ness of all things.13 I think I can see heavenly Tillich
nodding approvingly.
Broken Symbols
I have mentioned Tillich’s use of the notion of
broken symbols several times and want to approve
and deepen it. My book, The Truth of Broken Symbols,
is an explicitly Tillichian project.14 The first thing I
like about Tillich’s broken symbols notion is its at-
tack on literalism, literalism concerning God and
most religious engagements of ultimacy. Tillich’s is
an apophatic theology all the way down, even if he
did say once that the identification of God with Be-
ing-itself is meant literally (but Being-itself cannot
be described literally). The second thing I like
about Tillich’s broken symbols is that religion can-
not do without them. Only because we have those
symbols can we participate in the ontological and
ultimate affairs of deep religion. Without those
broken religious symbols, we are left with ontic su-
perficialities of modern thought. Rudolf Bultmann
thought those basic religious symbols could be
broken and then translated almost if not entirely
7
without remainder into the ontological existential-
ism of his day. For Bultmann, although those sym-
bols are important for exegesis of the Bible, in the
long run they can be supplanted. As I read Tillich,
however, for the most part the existential philoso-
phy and psychoanalysis he shared with Bultmann
served as a living context that allows us to re-en-
gage the broken symbols so as to participate in the
ultimate realities. Existential philosophy, indeed
existentialist culture with its art and other elements,
is inadequate on its own. I think the recognition of
this is why Tillich always said Christianity is based
on the revelation of Jesus Christ as the New Being
in the first century. Something revelatory and new
came about then that is captured in the fundamen-
tal Christian symbols that allows us to engage on-
tological depths and breadth that is inaccessible
without them, however broken. I have trouble with
Tillich’s account of the historicity of Jesus but ap-
prove his account of the historicity of the revela-
tory symbols of Jesus as New Being. I also believe
other religions have such innovative or revelatory
symbols at their founding base and developed in
axial points; these symbols cannot be evacuated
with no remainder without losing the ontological
depth and breadth of the religious traditions and
their symbols. I trust that Tillich would agree now,
having discussed the matter with Confucius, the
Buddha, Mohammed, Abhinavagupta, Vasa-
bandhu, and others. I trust that Tillich and Bult-
mann would have talked the matter through as
well.
The chief problem with Tillich’s notion of bro-
ken symbols is that it is at best a metaphor appeal-
ing to a philosophical history of Platonic and Neo-
Platonic participation theory. Plato’s refutation of
participation in the Parmenides does not help Til-
lich’s case. Nor does an appeal to a Neo-Platonic
One in which everything participates by degrees,
especially in light of Tillich’s significant reversal of
the direction of ontological transcendence, not up
to the Three, the Two, and the One but down to
the ground, the depths, and the abyss. (Tillich’s re-
versal of the metaphorical direction of transcend-
ence is one reason why I believe he does not fit
comfortably into the “fullness of being” camp: the
abyss is empty but shoots up creative fire—think
Berdyaev.) Tillich did not do a sufficient philo-
sophical job in unpacking his notion of broken
symbols.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
I undertook that philosophical job in The Truth
of Broken Symbols but had to appeal to yet another
intellectual father, Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s
pragmatic semiotics, of which Tillich knew little or
nothing, provides philosophical underpinnings for
a theory of broken symbols engaging ultimate real-
ities. I developed the notion of ultimate conditions
of existence as finite/infinite contrasts and argued
that by interpreting them, religious interpreters
could engage both the finite side of the symbols
and the non-finite or infinite side that carried the
weight of the unconditioned. The notion of “con-
trast” comes from Whitehead, whose lovechild
Frankenberry also says I am; I provided the analy-
sis of the radical contingency of the creation that
makes the creative act itself, form, components
formed, existential location, and achieved value
identity ultimates in their own right. Each is an un-
conditioned boundary condition of existence, and
each an object of interpretation.15 Since that book,
I have deepened my analysis (in a yet unpublished
book called Metaphysics of Goodness: Harmony and
Form, Beauty and Art, Obligation of Personhood, Flour-
ishing and Civilization) by expanding my theory of
truth as the carryover of value from the object in-
terpreted into the interpreting experience as quali-
fied by the biology, culture, semiotics, and pur-
poses of the interpreters.16 From Dewey I bor-
rowed and expanded the notion of a “situation” as
a harmony of many ecosystems of harmonies mod-
ifying causalities in relation to human experience
and interpretation. Revelatory broken symbols can
give access to ultimate realities and still be modified
so that their brokenness does not mislead the in-
terpreters. I am a lovechild also of Dewey. (Thank
goodness Tillich seems to have approved of poly-
amory!)
Wesley Wildman, another Tillich lovechild,
pushes back against my defense of broken sym-
bols, not my philosophical account so much as my
attempt to justify Tillich’s claim that we cannot do
without the broken symbols. In his forthcoming In
Our Own Image, he stresses the downsides and plain
mischief that come with anthropomorphic sym-
bols of God, and in his forthcoming Effing the Inef-
fable, he presents his own account of how religious
language can deal with deep mysteries, with little
essential need for traditional symbols. I hope our
conversation can continue.
8
Ultimate Concern
Let us now return to Tillich’s strictly theologi-
cal project of engaging ultimate reality or the
Ground of Being in terms of human ultimate con-
cern. Tillich said that two formal criteria of theol-
ogy exist:
The object of theology is what concerns us
ultimately. Only those propositions are theo-
logical which deal with their object in so far as
it can become a matter of ultimate concern for
us.17
Our ultimate concern is that which deter-
mines our being or not-being. Only those state-
ments are theological which deal with their ob-
jects in so far as it can become a matter of be-
ing or not-being for us.18
My own definition of religion is directly Til-
lichian in relation to this. I say that:
Religion is human engagement of ultimacy,
expressed in cognitive articulations, existential
responses to ultimacy that give ultimate defini-
tion to the individual and community, and pat-
terns of life and ritual in the face of ultimacy.19
A short way to say this is that religion is en-
gagement of ultimacy in cognitive, existential, and
practical ways. The cognitive ways are theology,
broadly understood. The existential ways are “that
which determines our being or not-being,” in Til-
lich’s language. Tillich was not much interested in
religious practices, rituals, and practical religious
living but he did not deny them. I develop the no-
tion of engagement from Dewey’s theory of expe-
rience as transaction or interaction of an organism
with its environment and it is a somewhat more
general philosophical notion than Tillich’s “con-
cern.” Tillich’s concern came from Heidegger and
carries the baggage of an analysis of the human as
Dasein, a highly subjective and non-naturalistic bias.
If one emphasizes creation as Tillich and I do, a
naturalistic interpretation of human life is easier
than a transcendental one in which the world and
God threaten to slide into products largely of hu-
man self-constitution. Tillich was far friendlier to
nature than Heidegger was, I think.
Let me follow Tillich now and ask how human
engagement of ultimacy determines our being or
non-being, beginning with engaging the cosmolog-
ical ultimates.20
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
The cosmological ultimate trait of form is faced
by human beings mainly as possibilities with vari-
ous kinds of goodness or value. Many of these pos-
sibilities are ones that will be actualized by our
choices, individually and conjointly. What we
choose determines both what will happen and also
our own characters as choosing agents. We lie un-
der obligation in the sense that our moral and cre-
ative character comes from our choices. All reli-
gions have a problematic of righteousness, ex-
pressed in many different ways, including issues
about knowing the competing goods in possibili-
ties, guilt for bad choices, modes of punishment
and reconciliation. It is an ultimate condition of
human life to lie under obligation. Tillich did not
focus very much on morality; like Schleiermacher,
he wanted to distinguish the religious concerns
from moral ones. But I think the deep meaning of
his distinction between our essential nature on the
one hand and the existential nature we have by vir-
tue of being thrown into choosing on the other
hand was his version of the problematic of living
under obligation.21 I hope to have developed that
point in more detail in my own writings.
The cosmological ultimate trait of bringing to-
gether the many components of human life gives
rise to the religious problematic of attaining whole-
ness, of selfhood, of overcoming suffering, of los-
ing or gaining the self. Religions have widely differ-
ent versions of what this problematic means. The
authenticity of selfhood was a primary focus for
Tillich and his existentialist compatriots. His dia-
lectics of estrangement and reconciliation, of the
predicaments of balancing out dynamics and form,
individuation and participation, freedom and des-
tiny, generally focused on attaining wholeness of
self, or reconciliation to fragmentation without es-
trangement in ongoing life.
The cosmological ultimate trait of having exis-
tential location relative to other harmonies within
creation gives rise to the religious problematic of
relating rightly to others, treating them with com-
passion, as we ourselves would like to be treated.
Within Christianity and nearly every other religion,
this is the problematic of love and hate, attention
to and estrangement from others. Tillich was
deeply committed to this as the material of proper
ultimate concern. Since his time, we have become
more acutely aware of the proper comportment to
non-human things in our environment for which
9
“love” is perhaps not the right word. I have ana-
lyzed this in Metaphysics of Goodness as conformation
to the real nature of things in truth, morality, right-
ness, and virtue.
The cosmological ultimate trait of achieving a
goodness or value by having a harmony’s compo-
nents integrated by its form in its assorted existen-
tial locations is, from the human perspective, the
problematic of the meaning of life, of personal life
and of existence as such, the cumulative perspec-
tive that might register a person’s value, and so
forth. This has at least two levels. The first is that
the very existence of a person (or anything else) as
a harmony means that the person has a goodness
or beauty in himself or herself, however good or
bad the person is for other things. The second is
that a person’s real identity is the combination of
subjective identity through what the person does
with what is given and the objective identity of how
the person affects other things. The mystery of the
meaning of a person’s life is that there is no per-
spective that can register both the subjective and
objective sides of identity except Being-itself or
God or the ontological creative act as the ontolog-
ical context in which all things are mutually rele-
vant, both subjectively in themselves and objec-
tively in others. Tillich dealt at length with the loss
of meaning in bourgeois culture and religion, and
rightly identified it with the problem of losing
touch with ontological depths and breadth.22 I have
expanded the theological problematic through the
symbologies of many more religions and cultures
than Tillich explored.23
The ontological ultimate trait of the radical con-
tingency of the world on the ontological creative
act or Ground of Being, when engaged by human
beings, gives rise to the deep religious problematic
of affirming or denying our existence, of choosing
life or death in Deuteronomy’s sense, of living in
gratitude and acceptance or in negativity and mali-
cious destructiveness. For Tillich, this was a matter
of organizing all the other aspects of religion
around accepting our acceptance by the Ground of
Being, which gives us ontological goodness, versus
affirming our estrangement.
Tillich was true to the German Idealistic pas-
sion for unity. He tried to handle all the dimensions
of human estrangement and reconciliation into the
New Being through the relation of individuals to
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
the Ground of Being. I prefer to give the cosmo-
logical ultimates their due and treat the existential
predicaments of righteousness, wholeness, com-
passionate engagement, and existential meaning
separately, and see how they interweave. This al-
lows us to acknowledge many more religions than
existential Christianity and see how they differently
develop and emphasize these problematics. But
Tillich was right that all the other ultimates of life
to be engaged depend on the contingent existence
of the world, the ontological ultimate problematic.
I hope that my philosophical theology is a way of
distinguishing the ultimate problematics of reli-
gious engagement, integrating them, and nesting
them in various ways in different kinds of religious
lives.
In addition to the predicaments Tillich so often
discussed are the ecstatic fulfillments that are also
related to the ecstasies of accepting obligation, self-
hood, otherness, meaning, and bliss in feeling the
ontological creative act. Tillich discussed ecstasy in
terms of Spirit. It meant for him both getting un-
stuck from our predicaments and enjoying the cre-
ativity of the Ground of Being in our own exist-
ence. One can understand Tillich’s situation, living
through two World Wars, as inclining him to worry
about the predicaments, and treating ecstasy itself
as an instrument of resolving the predicaments.
But I think the ecstasies have a quasi-independent
function and can enrich a religious life with very
few if any of the ultimate predicaments being re-
solved. If Tillich had focused more on the ultimate
meaning of dancing and singing, he would not have
had to depend so much for happiness on poly-
amory.
Philosophical Theology
In closing I want to return to the theme of phil-
osophical theology. I hope to have sounded Til-
lich’s praises as a philosophical theologian while
also expressing my wish that he had been more
thoroughly philosophical. My first claim about
philosophical theology is that it should take as its
public anyone from any tradition or situation who
might have an interest in the topic under discus-
sion. This means orienting one’s hypotheses and
arguments to the languages and cultural symbol
systems of the vast mélange of religious and theo-
logical positions today. For theological erudition to
10
get started means now learning comparative theol-
ogy on a fairly grand scale. Getting the basic texts
of the world’s religions and knowledge of their
practices into European languages is far more ad-
vanced today than in Tillich’s day.
Tillich began his Systematic Theology with the
claim that theology is a function of the Christian
church, meaning that he was doing only Christian
theology.24 He also claimed at the beginning that
theology is involved in a theological circle relating
our situation to the original revelatory kerygma and
back again. I think now it was unwise for him to tie
theology to Christian theology or to the church. Of
course, any good theology ought to be helpful to
Christians and the church, but also to Buddhists,
Hindus, Confucians, Daoists, Jews, Muslims, Pa-
gans, and purely secular people. But Tillich’s posi-
tion lacks the insights that Christian theologians
might learn about their topics by seeing what non-
Christian thinkers said about them. You cannot un-
derstand even the Christian theological tradition,
even its kerygma, only from the inside. I think that
later in his life, after travel in Asia and in writing
Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, Til-
lich was coming around to my view that the proper
public for theology is anyone interested in the topic
and therefore theology needs a form that addresses
their ways of thinking theologically. Theology for
him is about the truth of the theological topics, not
about defining loyalty to a group identity.
With regard to the theological circle, I have al-
ready argued that the traditional symbols of all re-
ligions should be mined for their potentials to en-
gage us with ultimate realities. The symbols should
not be given up just because they are broken. So I
agree with Tillich’s affirmation of the theological
circle, except that so many such relevant circles ex-
ist.
Nevertheless, we have a huge problem with the
systematic character of theology. Tillich was bril-
liant in presenting explosive flashes of insights,
such as in The Religious Situation, Dynamics of Faith,
The Courage to Be, and Biblical Religion and the Search
for Ultimate Reality.25 Yet even in those little books
he wrote with self-consciousness of the larger his-
torical and theoretical places of their topics. He was
a truly systematic philosophical theologian in the
sense that he knew that a change in one part of the
system likely demands changes in many other parts.
Moreover, he expressed his system as a whole in a
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
large, three-volume systematic theology. I am
pleased to have followed him in this too, although
I might be the only Tillichian so far to do so. But
his system dealt almost exclusively with Christian-
ity and the secular world of philosophy and culture
at the boundary of Christianity. His autobiograph-
ical book, On the Boundary, illustrated the point that
he lived within the bounds of Christianity and
within what was just beyond those bounds.26 Nev-
ertheless, a theological system today needs to in-
habit all the theological worlds and their different
secular contexts. Religions and theological worlds
are not distinguished by boundaries. Instead, they
interweave through historical and conceptual inter-
mixing. If we begin with our “religious situation”
(Tillich’s phrase), our theological resources and
their alternatives are global, cross-cultural, and
sortable in many ways.27 A contemporary theolog-
ical system needs to deal with dozens of theological
circles, interpreting foundational revelatory texts
and practices with all their historical confluences
and divergences. A contemporary systematic theo-
logian needs to be a master of world history as well
as a master of comparative philosophy and theol-
ogy. No one can truly master these things and so
we are especially vulnerable to correction in mat-
ters of history and conceptual universal perspicac-
ity.
Ours is a time when the opposite theological
sensibility prevails. Many think that only contextual
theology is relevant because it has a practical, for
instance, liberative, focus, and humble because it
makes to no pretense to understand the perspec-
tives, ideas, and judgments of others. Tillich is the
last great counter-argument to contextual theology,
showing it to be irresponsible and arrogant in what
it prides itself in neglecting. I am confident that Til-
lich in heaven is writing furiously to expand his sys-
tem to relate to all religious experience in order to
combat the contextualism of postmodernism as he
did the contextualism of Barth and Evangelical
Christianity. “Tillich in heaven” is a broken signal
signifying a task for us philosophical theologians.
Response
Sharon Peebles Burch
I took real delight in learning of Nancy Frank-
enberry’s characterization of you as Tillich’s
11
lovechild—what a great way to call attention to the
parallels between your work and his.
The topic on which I see a particular affinity is
the development of the idea that an ontological
creative act is as close as we can come to defining
the Source of all that is. Tillich struggled to release
the concept of God from its moorings in human
invention, and your work extends his efforts. What
I think is particularly compelling is the way that
your work underscores the significance and im-
portance of the immanent. That is a critical and I
think frequently overlooked correction to assump-
tions about transcendence that are often (espe-
cially, I find, in faith communities) taken for
granted.
Your ideas place before us challenges to
change, some of which I find comforting, and
some of which I find anxiety producing. For the
most part, I read your paper with pleasure and
equanimity. Much of that is due to my involvement
with Tillich’s work on Being-Itself. It prepared me
to encounter as exciting the idea of an ontological
creative act as a dynamic description of what is in-
tended by the word “God.” Without that back-
ground, I realized that encountering the implica-
tions of your work could prove distinctly troubling,
if not terrifying.
But before I go any further, I’d better take a
moment to deal with the question of which of Til-
lich’s statements about Being-Itself I am referring
to. It is not the flat-footed assertion in Volume
One that the only non-symbolic statement that can
be made about God is that God is Being-Itself. I
am far more closely aligned with Tillich’s statement
in the introduction to Volume Two where, in what
he calls a “partial reformulation” of some ideas in
Volume One, he says that “everything we say about
God is symbolic.”
Those two statements have existed side by side
ever since the first two volumes of the Systematics
were published. He never refuted his statement in
Volume One, which continues to this day to be
printed with that original formulation in place. As
recently as the 2011 AAR, Durwood Foster and
Rob James argued about which of the two formu-
lations represented the “true Tillich.” Rob James
argued that the statement in Volume One repre-
sented the true Tillichian view — that the view he
expressed in Volume Two was a misstep, a mo-
mentary lapse of judgment. Durwood Foster took
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
the opposite point of view. He felt the reformula-
tion in Volume Two most closely represented Til-
lich’s position, and rued the fact that Tillich never
clearly refuted the statement in Volume One. As he
said in a 2015 article for the Tillich Society Bulletin,
“To say in one place firmly that it is one way, and
then later state pointedly that it is another way,
amounts to more than a ‘partial reformulation.’”
(God and Being Itself, 2015).
To underscore his argument that the Volume
Two assertion was Tillich’s working assumption
right up to the end of his life, Durwood quoted a
paragraph from the Earl Lectures of 1963, which
he edited and published in 1996 under the title The
Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message. In
course of those lectures, Tillich said:
Let us avoid objectifying statements about
the holy. Let us avoid giving it names, even the
traditional ones of theology. When we do give
it names…then let us always have a yes and a
no in our statements. It is remarkable how the
biblical language, especially the Old Testament,
presents a very concrete God whom it seems
everyone could make into an object alongside
other objects. But try it. This God will evade
you. You never can fix this God. Hence the
prohibition to name God, since a name is
something you can grasp, something which
tries to “define” or make finite. This is the
greatness of the biblical language. It avoids ob-
jectifying. In all great religious experiences, the
divine appears and disappears…For this we
have the word “epiphany,” which means the
appearing of an ungraspable divine power—
being there and not being there. This “yes and
no” is the foundation of all speaking about the
divine.28
That is the statement that resonates with my
understanding of Tillich’s enterprise. I want to be
clear about that. Your work furthers Tillich’s life-
long exploration of what it would mean to recog-
nize, internalize, and accept the concept that God,
the Divine, Transcendent, Sacred is without refer-
ent. It can be inferred, it can be suggested, it can be
intuited—but it cannot be described, quantified, or
defined.
As I said earlier, what I find particularly com-
pelling is the way that your work underscores the
significance and importance of the immanent, a
topic that deserves more focus and investigation
12
than it has received to date—an opinion I derived
at least in part when I was teaching a Doctor of
Ministry seminar at San Francisco Theological
Seminary, a Presbyterian institution.
The course was entitled “Theology of Minis-
try” and it was the first course required in the core
curriculum for the degree. Since the class consisted
of experienced pastors, one of its purposes was to
help the students become aware of their underlying
theological assumptions. The hope was that they
would be able to work creatively to expand the
number and quality of the theological insights that
undergirded their ministries. On the first day of
class, I asked them to introduce themselves and to
reflect on their most recent sermon and how it was
received by a church member of their choice, for
example, a single mother who had two teenage
children, a full-time job, and limited economic
means. What did the sermon offer to her? Or how
did it provide succor, reassurance, and promise to
a family working to provide for a beloved dad now
afflicted with Alzheimer’s? It quickly became clear
that my request made little or no sense to them.
They were ready and able to describe how their ser-
mons reflected current scholarly Biblical perspec-
tives, presented theological interpretations that
were cogent and helped the congregation develop
a more sophisticated faith, challenged members of
the church to be more sensitive to social injustice
and offered ways in which beneficences would
benefit both the church and the community. But
how did it affect a congregation member? That
proved surprisingly evasive—unless they were de-
scribing someone who reacted negatively to a spe-
cific theological issue. I was taken aback. As a Til-
lichian, I have a deep and abiding conviction that
what makes my teaching, pastoring, or writing im-
portant is that it addresses real life concerns of real
live people. This was not true for my students.
They assumed they knew the questions that people
had. They didn’t need to ask.
In addition, they were quite clear that they had
come to the Doctor of Ministry program to learn
“tips, tricks, and techniques” that would serve to
polish their already considerable expertise. My job
was to offer them tools that they could use to pro-
mote their perspectives. I found myself quite put
out by what I took to be their complacency. As I
began to poke around, looking for where I could
connect with their existential questions and make
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
this course meaningful for them, I ran into a lot of
bromides that crop up in times of confusion and
pain. The students in my class all seemed to have a
common relationship to ideas of transcendence—
for example, God is an all-powerful heavenly being
that can intervene and muck about in events and
individual lives. Thus, if tragedy strikes, they feel
free to explain that this God they are speaking of
has a plan, and this tragedy is part of that plan; eve-
rything works together for good for those who
love God; we may not understand why this has
happened to us, but that is because we can’t see the
larger picture—in other words, spiritual aspirin
that hopefully would dull the pain.
I realized they also read Scripture from this em-
phasis on transcendence. For example, the story of
Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well
could have begun with a reminder to the disciples
at about 10 am that morning when Jesus hitched
up his britches and said “Hey, we’d better get going
—I have to meet this woman at a well by 2 pm
today.” In other words, this event was a foreor-
dained meeting manipulated by divine intervention
to illustrate the purposes of God. But if this is con-
sidered from the standpoint of the immanence in-
ferred by your “ontological creative act,” it took
place because it was possible. From this view the
lesson that it offered was not a master plan for dis-
cipleship for the followers of Jesus, not a reward to
the virtue of the woman encountered, not an ex-
ample of how to love others, even Samaritans, as
ourselves. The woman experienced being received
and heard—and she was changed. She could not
have predicted it, yearned for it above all else in her
prayers, undertaken a rigorous set of spiritual dis-
ciplines in order to make it come about. It was an
ontologically creative moment.
Similarly, why would Jesus talk to Matthew? He
grew up in Nazareth, and he knew full well that one
didn’t talk to the town tax collector—he was a trai-
tor because he worked for the Roman occupiers,
he regularly and as a matter of course took ad-
vantage of the people of the town, and talking to
him would render Jesus unclean in the eyes of the
temple authorities—why ever would he have done
that? The temptation was to assume the transcend-
ent view—Jesus just knew that Matthew would be
a devoted and dedicated disciple and write a Gos-
pel about his teachings. But if this is considered
from the standpoint of an ontological creative act,
13
the focus shifts to Matthew. How could he listen
to this invitation and receive it with such confi-
dence that he invited Jesus and his disciples over to
his home the next evening? That would have ended
Matthew’s career as a tax collector, including the
money he enjoyed spending and the position that
tax collecting afforded him in Roman society. If we
read this as a portrayal of the immanence of the
Divine in human existence, it is Matthew’s “yes”
that is the miracle in this story.
The more I considered the attitudes I was en-
countering, the more I realized that they stemmed
from a pervasive outlook that attributed to God
and to God’s glory the way that churches are struc-
tured, clergy is trained and supported, and liturgies
are conducted—in other words, a transcendent
view that minimizes contingency and change. But
facing the full implications of immanence as a pri-
mary aspect of how humans apprehend the Sacred
can be terrifying, and the reactions of my students
gave me an insight into just how appropriate the
word “terrify” was to the topic. I did not realize I
would encounter reactive fear and resistance to
change to the degree I did, and it truly gave me
pause. I began to ponder just how close the con-
temporary theological scene comes to idolatry by
absolutizing transcendence. Your ideas challenge
that pattern of assumptions by suggesting that the
creative force of the universe, that out of which we
came, that from which we feel ourselves separated,
that with which we yearn to be reunited, requires
us to accept radical immanence—before which we
stand, struck dumb because we can do nothing
other than to be silent in the face of that which is
coming to be, and lend ourselves to that energeti-
cally and wholeheartedly.
The question then becomes what we as theolo-
gians do—many of us engaged in training clergy—
do to equip ourselves and those with whom we
work to provide succor and relief when we encoun-
ter the tragic circumstances that are all too often a
part of everyday existence? What do I say to the
husband and children of the woman who was killed
in the Las Vegas massacre? Or to the refugees who
lost family members, pets, belongings and homes
to the recent wildfires quite near my home in Cali-
fornia? How do I offer comfort to the friends and
families of the pedestrians in New York who were
killed by the truck driven by a religious fanatic? Am
I saying that God, by whatever set of assumptions
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
I recognize that term, is actually present to such
things? And the answer is yes, because if we take
what Tillich introduced and you have elegantly de-
veloped, we have to.
And that brings me to what I find comforting
about radical immanence. There are no moments
when any created anything can be separate from
that act out of which all things emerge. Humanly
unknowable potential is present. The fact that we
do not understand or comprehend it does not
change that fact. What is certain is that an “onto-
logical creative act” is in process. What that is re-
mains a mystery and always will. Because this im-
manence requires the ability to withstand the fear,
instability, and terror that frequently accompanies
the learning of something new—and always learn-
ing something new—the human yearning for com-
fort, certainty, reassurance and mastery is con-
stantly being challenged. As theologians, we are
aware of the yearning of fellow human beings for
certainty and stability. How do we present the
promise and hope implicit in the radical imma-
nence of God to our everyday lives? We are in the
presence of a remarkable opportunity. How do we
lend ourselves to being in harmony with that which
comes forth—how does one support life, nurture
promise, aid growth, allow change, identify barriers
and help remove them? And how do we tolerate
the need to constantly be in the process of discern-
ment since what was accepted as a constant yester-
day may not meet today’s needs?
One of the most basic assumptions that radical
immanence affects concerns the role and reign of
human beings. Far from being the motive force of
creation and masters of all that we survey, we are
being humbled by finding ourselves participants in
a vaster and far more complex reality than ever be-
fore we have conceived. I find it interesting that
science is experiencing this same de-centering of
human mastery. It is speaking openly about what is
not yet known—dark matter, dark holes, chaos
theory, string theory, dark energy. Astrophysicists
assert that 94% of everything is either dark energy
or dark matter, and they don’t know what either is
just yet. They don’t know if the experiments they
have initiated to help them explore phenomena will
produce helpful data—they have to wait and see—
just as we theologians must. Both fields are experi-
encing the reorientation that a serious considera-
tion of the importance of the immanent demands.
14
In 1955, Tillich heralded this sort of change
with a volume of sermons that he entitled The New
Being.29 He defines “New Being” as the state of be-
ing reconciled to the Source of all that is. Not be-
cause of being religious, not by virtue of having
faith and believing, not because of evincing a par-
ticular set of religious convictions, but because
New Being is available to all humanity without any
qualification. He describes everything as proceed-
ing from New Being and declares that cultural, re-
ligious, and philosophic divisions cannot impede
that truth. He takes great pains to explain that the
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are one of the ways
that New Being has been revealed, but New Being
is an aspect of what it means to be religious in
whatever form that takes—Judaism, Buddhism, or
Hinduism—or secular movements, like Scientism,
Secularism, or the New Atheism, any set of convic-
tions that hold their precepts to be ultimately true.
New Being isn’t something that has swooped in
and taken over, but something that exists and has
always existed. It is an insight for all humanity, not
limited to those who believe in Jesus as the Christ.
We are in the presence of constantly creative
Source out of which the new can emerge. Silent be-
fore it we search to accept the new and work to-
ward maintaining our focus on what creative, con-
structive aspect can be raised up, brought forward,
incorporated into what is taking place.
In these times, what would this consist of? We
don’t know. We won’t ever know. But being pre-
sented with the option, being helped toward con-
ceiving of what it means to be in the presence of
an ontological creative act is essential. This is such
creative, constructive and important work you’ve
placed before us. Thank you!
Response
Wesley J. Wildman
In borrowing the metaphor of lovechild to
characterize his relationship to Paulus Tillich, Rob-
ert Cummings Neville is both making a kind of
joke and affirming something extremely serious. I’ll
offer brief reflections on the joke and longer
thoughts on the serious point of his self-descrip-
tion.
The joke refers to Tillich’s pattern of powerful
romantic attachments with other women, including
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
students, which may sometimes have turned sex-
ual. I have taught Tillich’s life and thought every
second year for a couple of decades now, and every
time students struggle to come to terms with this
aspect of Tillich’s behavior, which might well have
led to public excoriation in our time, especially if
one of the students had complained about un-
wanted romantic or sexual advances. History helps,
I have found, as always. Here’s my best under-
standing, garnered from as much as I’ve been able
to read and as many people as I’ve been able to talk
with, including the inimitable Durwood Foster, of
blessed memory.
Hannah and Paulus had found one another af-
ter the Great War, which brought to army chaplain
Paulus bleak despair, psychological breakdowns,
heartbreak, and betrayal as his wife became preg-
nant through an affair with his best friend. In the
frazzled nerves and desperate existential searching
of post-war German culture, Paulus dove into the
intensity offered within the artistic, literary, and in-
tellectual activities of the salons where groups of
friends formed. There he met Hannah, who was
doing something similar, looking for her own kind
of healing. Paulus ultimately drew Hannah away
from a probably unhappy marriage, essentially do-
ing to Hannah’s husband what had been done to
Paulus by his friend. Paulus and Hannah were
drawn toward the kind of passionate love that
seemed to be the only way to make sense of per-
sonal life, the only reality worth cultivating.
Hannah and Paulus had negotiated an open
marriage from the start. This was a result of their
determination to place love above all else in life, a
post-World War I Bohemian commitment that dis-
placed Paulus’s earlier puritanicalism and fulfilled
Hannah’s endlessly sensual aspirations. That’s an
historical context that’s critical to grasp, since oth-
erwise it is obscure why two young people in love
with one another would so deliberately flaunt social
conventions about love and marriage. For both of
them, society contained, compressed, and limited
love, whereas they felt destined to keep the light of
love alive in all of their dealings with other people.
For both, this meant intense connections with oth-
ers, probing existential conversations whenever
possible, the baring of souls so as to encounter oth-
ers heart-to-heart, and sometimes the sharing of
bodies—especially for Hannah, as she recounts in
15
her autobiographical reflections in From Time to
Time.30
For Paulus, inevitably, this sometime involved
relationships that crossed the boundaries between
people of relatively different power, as between
professor and student, doctor and patient, or ther-
apist and client. We have seen that go wrong so
many times, becoming (or beginning as) exploita-
tive and harmful, that many institutions in our time
seek to regulate relationships across large power
differentials. Yet, to the best of our knowledge,
none of Tillich’s (or Hannah’s) partners ever com-
plained or were damaged in this process, though of
course this may have occurred silently. I think Han-
nah and Paulus did reasonably well at sticking to
their principles, placing holistic love above social
conventions and containers, and seeking to draw
out from the depths of culture all the beauty and
intense passion they could.
Everything is ambiguous, however, and Han-
nah’s and Paulus’s love principle is no exception. I
think we see this most clearly in the hurt Hannah
felt over time. For her, unlimited love was espe-
cially a sensual journey with the power to heal and
comfort past trauma, to which she alludes in From
Time to Time. But it appears that nothing she ever
did with others cast a shadow over her love for
Paulus. For Paulus, by contrast, this journey was
less about sensuality, and more about existential
connection and realizing in the moment the intense
depths of nature. He was more likely to become
infatuated, to fall into a fantasy of love, than he was
to seek sexual satisfaction. I believe this is some-
thing Hannah had not bargained on when she ne-
gotiated a love-first open marriage. She thought it
would be for Paulus like it was for her, a sensual
extension of their shared emotional attachment,
their unbreakable bond. She really did not like his
serial romantic attachments. He appears to have re-
fused to discuss or even acknowledge the mount-
ing problem, which amounts to a refusal to rene-
gotiate the terms of the marriage when renegotia-
tion was precisely what was required to fulfill love’s
demand, supposedly the overriding principle driv-
ing the arrangement. Paulus’s end-of-life apology
to Hannah for knowingly hurting her, an apology
that she seems to have accepted, is telling. He had
known what he was doing to her but he enjoyed it,
he savored it, and he didn’t want to change.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Despite her acceptance of Paulus’s apology,
Hannah’s hurt is amply evident in From Time to
Time, published after Paulus died. Indeed, Paulus’s
friend Rollo May rushed into print his own psycho-
logically penetrating biography of Paulus31 to cor-
rect what he felt were distortions in Hannah’s
book. As a result, we have more information than
we have ever had about the personal life of a great
philosophical theologian. This is a mixed blessing.
We only found out about Karl Barth’s rejection (or
transcending) of the conventions of marriage be-
cause of leaks around the stopper of his family’s
attempt to protect his professional reputation. But
we don’t have Barth’s account, or his wife’s, of this
critical life decision. If we know something about a
person’s boundary-breaking love, perhaps it is bet-
ter to know as much as possible, so that we can
honestly reconstruct the thinking and feeling be-
hind the ambiguities of the associated decision.
And if we know nothing, we can focus on the in-
tellectual accomplishments without distraction
from the messy realities of personal life.
Neville has made different life choices than
Paulus, Hannah, and Karl Barth. He is more Con-
fucian than all of them, seeing wisdom in the social
conventions that contain and constrain love, and
being open to but suspicious of the Daoist-like,
Bohemian rejection of socially supported regula-
tion of sexual and romantic intensity. Note that
Neville is far from puritanical in his appraisal of
Tillich’s life and loves. He grasps the adventure and
respects the attempt to place love above all. But he
prefers the ambiguities of ordered institutional
support of self-regulation to the ambiguities of
freewheeling regulation-free exploration of life’s
intensities. In this respect, he is very much not Til-
lich’s lovechild.
Like all children, even those of the lovechild
kind, Neville’s thought exhibits many places of re-
sistance to the powerful parent, places where Ne-
ville’s way of thinking diverges from Tillich’s,
sharply or subtly. One way to approach such places
of divergence is to compare the three volumes of
Tillich’s Systematic Theology (ST) with the three vol-
umes of Neville’s Philosophical Theology (PT), as fil-
tered by Neville’s own remarks, to which this essay
is a response.
Let’s begin with the category of ultimate reality.
Neville says Tillich invented it but it was actually
16
Max Weber’s invention, originally. Yet Tillich cer-
tainly did a lot of theological good with the idea,
including establishing “the category of ultimacy or
ultimate reality as a universal comparative category
for recognizing what counts as religion.” In Part II
of ST, “Being and God,” Tillich demonstrates the
function of ultimate reality as a comparative cate-
gory by surveying and summarizing a formidable
array of ultimacy ideas from the history of reli-
gions. The categorization he applies to this phe-
nomenological smorgasbord of ultimacy concepts
is less than compelling and has not been particu-
larly influential. Nevertheless, the very fact that he
employed a comparative category in the way he did
was groundbreaking for Christian theology.
Neville moves along the same paths in his PT,
the light handed down from Tillich held high.
Where the academic study of religion is paralyzed
by the problem of defining religion in a way that is
adequate to the varied phenomena we are inclined
to call religious, Neville boldly stipulates a defini-
tion of religion in terms of the presence of ultimate
concern, which when properly ordered is authentic
engagement with ultimate reality. Neville is not
particularly interested in using the word “religion”
to describe human activities that lie outside the
scope of this definition. Of course, solving the
problem of defining religion through stipulation
will never fly with experts in the academic study of
religion, for whom the delicacy of the issue re-
solves around the furiously diverse intricacies of
the beliefs, behaviors, experiences, and objects we
are inclined to describe as religious. But Neville’s
instincts are all about philosophical clarity, and Til-
lich is his greatest ally in this respect. Here we def-
initely have a lovechild situation.
Neville claims that he is more mindful of phil-
osophical depth and precision than Tillich was, at
least the Tillich of the ST. I think that claim is gen-
erally correct. Tillich was interested in staying
within the theological circle, and only drew on phil-
osophical analysis when it suited his broadly theo-
logical purposes in ST. Yet my sense is that Tillich
has more going on philosophically than Neville
acknowledges.
For instance, Neville objects that Tillich didn’t
say much about what ground of being is. In partic-
ular, Tillich didn’t resolve the fundamental ques-
tion of whether Tillich belongs to the camp hold-
ing that the ground of being is the fullness of being,
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
or to the camp holding that the ground of being is
“the completely novel ontological creation of eve-
rything determinate as finite being.” Neville sus-
pects that Tillich “did not appreciate the difference
and drew from both when convenient.” Neville
himself belongs in the second camp, as the most
radical exponent of the creatio ex nihilo view in the
history of the western tradition, pushing the con-
cept virtually all the way to occasionalism, with eve-
rything being created new, moment to moment,
and causal relationships themselves created new,
moment to moment, from eternity. This gives Ne-
ville more in common with medieval Islamic occa-
sionalist theologians than almost all theologians of
our era, which is an unusual mark of distinction.
But is it really the case that Tillich failed to recog-
nize that he needed to pick a camp?
I think Tillich’s touchstone for picturing the
God-world relationship through creation is neither
Thomas Aquinas not Rene Descartes, champions
of the two camps Neville seeks to foist upon Til-
lich, but Plotinus—and Plotinus understood not as
articulating a fullness-of-being view through the
process of emanation, but Plotinus understood as
neutral between reflexive creation from a fullness
of being and reflexive creation from abysmal noth-
ingness. Tillich maintains this ambiguity, I think
quite deliberately. Tillich never seems drawn by the
Cartesian or Nevillian picture of radical creation ex
nihilo, so Tillich represents a genuine alternative to
Neville’s forced choice. It is this ambiguity in Til-
lich, which I feel sure is carefully cultivated and
perfectly deliberate, that has made the ST such a
rich dialogue partner for Buddhist thinkers, who
recognize their own emptiness conceptions of ulti-
macy within Tillich’s conceptual art. At this point I
am more Tillich’s lovechild than Neville is.
Moreover, Tillich’s ST says rather a lot about
ground of being, describing its character in and
through the grounding of the ontologically basic
self-world correlation; the three polar elements of
individualization-participation, dynamics-form,
and freedom-destiny; the critical narrative contrast
between essential and existential being, reflecting
his formation in the absolute idealist world of
Schelling; and the categories of space, time, causal-
ity, and substance (on which Tillich was already
decades out of date when he published ST Volume
One in 1951, not taking account of the way mod-
ern physics interrupts his classical interpretation of
17
all four concepts). In showing how these facets of
ground of being matter concretely for the interpre-
tation of human life, Tillich conveys a great deal
about his central metaphor. But he does it without
much sign of Neville’s abiding obsession with
speculative metaphysics. Neville is a practical phi-
losopher, to be sure, but Tillich is more practical,
more existential, and more realistic about the limits
of human reason. Or perhaps we should say Tillich
is less adventurous and more bound by needless
philosophical limitations.
Neville claims that Tillich’s focus on ultimate
concern, rather than on that plus the other four
cosmological ultimates Neville recommends to us
in his PT, limits Tillich’s ability to register what is
distinctively different as well as similar across the
world’s manifold depictions of ultimacy. That’s
correct, up to a point, but only because Tillich
lacked interest in covering that question in that par-
ticular way within ST, not because he lacked the
concepts needed for such an analysis. Indeed, the
three polar elements have the potential to function
as the kind of atomic theory of ultimacy that Ne-
ville secures with his five ultimates. Tillich’s atomic
toolkit doesn’t have to live with the semantic awk-
wardness of having five ultimates (one ontological
and four cosmological), which is as close to an ox-
ymoron as you’ll ever find in Neville’s eerily con-
sistent and magnificently precise language in PT.
And Tillich does much better at recognizing the ex-
istential dilemmas connected with Neville’s four
cosmological ultimates than Neville acknowledges.
In fact, Tillich’s three polar elements are potent re-
sources for rehearsing the existential dilemmas and
distortions of the human condition, and he rings
that bell over and over again in the ST.
Furthermore, Neville asserts that, “freed from
human ultimate concern, Tillich would have seen
that the Ground of Being is the ground of any
kinds of beings whatsoever.” But Part IV of ST, on
“Life and the Spirit,” makes it abundantly clear that
the ground of being grounds all beings and all di-
mensions of being, including but not limited to the
dimension of spirit that characterizes the fullness
of being in human life. I feel sure that Tillich would
be gratified to have us recognize his unusually
forceful efforts to have all dimensions of being
thoroughly embraced in his theological system. He
might not mention microbes, as I’d be inclined to
do, but he wouldn’t complain if someone else did.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Neville has greatly improved upon Tillich’s
handling of broken religious symbols—that is,
symbols that point to ultimate reality as their logical
object but necessarily fail to express the intended
fullness and thus are broken. He has improved on
Peirce as well in the same regard. I don’t know
what else to say about that without recounting Ne-
ville’s theory of symbols, which he has already
done. So, I’ll just say that Neville’s semiotics is far
more comprehensive, far more nuanced, far more
useful for analysis, and just far better.
Neville comments that Tillich’s “system dealt
almost exclusively with Christianity and the secular
world of philosophy and culture at the boundary of
Christianity.” This is correct, I think, at least as a
characterization of Tillich’s writings up until the
last decade of his life. Though published over a pe-
riod of 12 years, Tillich’s ST was written over sev-
eral decades, and his thought changed a lot in that
time. In the last decade of his life, Tillich did begin
to engage traditions of religious thought and prac-
tice beyond the limits of Christianity. We see that
particularly in some of the occasional writings of
this period, but also in Volume III of ST, published
in 1963, in which Tillich strove mightily to allow
his growing awareness of other religions to impact
his theological ontology. He was painfully aware
that he was grappling with deep conceptual frac-
tures in his system, and only widening the fissures
by pressing toward greater adequacy in his engage-
ment of other religions. After all, it is difficult to
take Buddhism with complete seriousness on its
own terms when your own view centralizes the life
of Jesus the Christ as the lynch pin of history, real-
izing essential being under the conditions of exist-
ence, and setting lose the transformative power of
that historic moment through the church.
If the concept of essential being were rendered
as an ideal, realized better and worse in human af-
fairs generally and in religious geniuses specifically,
and thereby detached from history except insofar
as history is the bearer of occasions of the fragmen-
tary and ambiguous manifestation of this ideal, Til-
lich could have solved his problem. Troeltsch had
accomplished that much before Tillich, and even
Friedrich Schleiermacher was almost there at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. But Tillich ap-
pears to have been too conventionally Christian to
move in that direction. For him, the once-for-all
historical manifestation of the concrete-absolute in
18
a human life, activating all dimensions of life, was
the critical element of the Christian story. Despite
his misgivings about the difficulties his approach
posed for making sense of religious traditions out-
side of Christianity, he held what he took to be the
Christian line. He reshaped his understanding of
the spirit and of the spiritual community to move
in a new direction, but he never crossed his self-
drawn line. Also, ST Volumes One and Two were
already published, and Tillich couldn’t cross the
line drawn in those volumes without destroying the
ST’s internal coherence. Neville brashly crosses
that line, however, and without any hint of anguish.
Neville’s theological circle is correspondingly
much larger than Tillich’s, embracing everyone
with something serious to say or feel or think about
matters of ultimate concern in human life, regard-
less of religious or non-religious affiliation.
In the end, Tillich realized that he had run out
of time, so he was forced to release the final vol-
ume of his system into the wild, mindful that a
proper solution to the conceptual fractures intro-
duced by his flowering awareness of religious plu-
ralism would require nothing less than a compre-
hensively restructured system. It is with this in
mind that we should re-hear some moving sen-
tences from the Preface to Volume Three of ST.
My friends and I sometimes feared that the
system would remain a fragment. This has not
happened, though even at its best this system
is fragmentary and often inadequate and ques-
tionable. Nevertheless, it shows the stage at
which my theological thought has arrived. Yet
a system should be not only a point of arrival
but a point of departure as well. It should be
like a station at which preliminary truth is crys-
talized on the endless road toward truth.32
What Tillich’s emotionally bare-to-the-bones
self-reflection in this passage does not envisage is
the extent to which his system influenced so many
others. Not many of those influenced have pro-
duced full systems, to be sure, just as Neville notes.
But the influence is profound nonetheless. As far
as systems are concerned, Tillich’s influence is seen
nowhere more clearly than in Neville’s PT. It might
be nothing more than a fond fantasy, but I picture
Neville, who has always said he writes for Tillich in
heaven, as having produced the kind of system that
Tillich himself would have strived to produce had
he lived another couple of decades with his wits
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
fully about him. In this fond fantasy, Neville really
is Tillich’s lovechild.
2 For what I learned from Smith, and some reflec-
tions on his relations with Tillich, see my “John E.
Smith: Doing Something with American Philosophy,”
in my Defining Religion: Essays in Philosophy of Religion (Al-
bany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018),
chapter 17.
3 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1952).
4 My Philosophical Theology is a trilogy of books: Ulti-
mates: Philosophical Theology Volume One (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2013), Existence:
Philosophical Theology Volume Two (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2014), and Religion: Phil-
osophical Theology Volume Three (Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York, 2015).
5 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume One (Chi-
cago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 1951), Systematic
Theology: Volume Two (Chicago, IL: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1957), and Systematic Theology: Volume Three
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963). The
title of my systematics, Philosophical Theology, was a de-
liberate variant on Tillich’ title. Originally, I had
wanted to entitle the volumes Philosophical Theology Vol-
ume One, Volume Two, and Volume Three, in imitation of
Tillich. But the Press explained that with electronic
sales and bookkeeping, my volumes would be known
by the first word in the title and thus would be indis-
tinguishable. Ultimates, Existence, and Religion had been
my subtitles and I moved them to the first place, put-
ting me farther from imitating Tillich than I had
wished.
6 Systematic Theology: Volume One, pp. 8-11.
7 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought:
From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existential-
ism. Edited by Carl E. Braaten (New York, NY: Si-
mon and Schuster, 1957).
8 Systematic Theology: Volume Two, pp. 5-10.
9 Well, he did devote most of Part Two of his Sys-
tematic Theology to the question, so I exaggerate.
10 On this point in Descartes, see my Realism in Re-
ligion: A Pragmatist’s Perspective (Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2009), chapter 13.
11 All this is argued exhaustingly in my Ultimates.
12 See his complicated argument in Biblical Religion
and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1955).
13 This is argued at length in my Ultimates and Ex-
istence.
14 The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1996). The theory in
19
that book is put to work for Christian symbols in my
Symbols of Jesus: A Christianity of Symbolic Engagement
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
and for Confucian symbols in Boston Confucianism: Port-
able Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press,, 2000).
15 This argument pervades my Ultimates. Alfred
North Whitehead’s discussion of contrasts is in his
Process and Reality, corrected edition by David Ray Grif-
fin and Donald Sherburne (New York, NY: The Free
Press/Macmillan, 1978).
16 This theory of truth was first elaborated and de-
fended in my Recovery of the Measure (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1989), part 1.
17 Systematic Theology: Volume One, 12
18 Systematic Theology: Volume One, 14.
19 Ultimates, p. 4.
20 This is the main argument of my Existence, the
title of which, of course, comes from Tillich’s usage.
21 In addition to his well-known argument in Sys-
tematic Theology: Volume Two, see his remarkable Love,
Power, and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press,
1960) in which he gives ontological, existential, and
moral interpretations of these notions.
22 This is true from early works such as The Reli-
gious Situation, translated by H. Richard Niebuhr (New
York, NY: Henry Holt, 1932) and The Protestant Era,
translated by James Luther Adams (Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1948) to his late Systematic
Theology: Volume Three.
23 See his beginnings with Christianity and the En-
counter of the World Religions (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1963).
24 See my analysis of the nearly identical begin-
nings of Tillich’s and Karl Barth’s big systematic theol-
ogies on this point in Realism in Religion, chapter 1.
25 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York, NY:
Harper and Brothers, 1957).
26 On the Boundary (New York, NY: Scribner,
1966).
27 This is the argument of my Religion.
28 Paul Tillich, The Irrelevance and Relvance of the
Christian Message. ed. Durwood Foster (The Pilgrim
Press, 1996).
29 Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1955) 15-24.
30 Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York:
Stein and Day, 1973).
31 Rollo May, Paulus: Tillich as Spiritual Teacher (Dal-
las, TX: Saybrook, 1988).
32 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume
Three, Preface.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Power as Basic Element of Analy-
sis for Theological Response to
Fascism: A Study of Paul Tillich’s
Concept of the Demonic and the
Religious Symbols of Kingdom of
God and the Spiritual Presence
and Their Implications for
Understanding the World
Politics Today
Ho Siu Pun
Abstract
There are one proposal and one argument in this
paper.1 I propose to employ Tillich’s idea of the
demonic as a lens to theologically understand and
respond to fascism. But before talking about this, I
would first describe the ambiguity of the term
“power” in Tillich’s writings. This would allow us
to better grasp his idea of the demonic. In the third
part of this paper I argue that studying Tillich’s idea
of the demonic should be accompanied by the
study of his two religious symbols, “Kingdom of
God” and “The Spiritual Presence.” Finally, I
would raise some questions for further thinking
about some aspects of the world politics today.
Ambiguity of “Power” in Tillich’s Writings
The meaning of the English word “power” is am-
biguous in Tillich’s writings, in a sense that there
are more than one connotations of this word.
These connotations are used by Tillich symboli-
cally. Kyle Paswark identifies three meanings in
German for the term “power” in Tillich’s writings.
2
The first one is Kraft. It is formless abyss of being
but it rushes out and enters reality in form. It is the
origin of power, Urkräfte which sustains all beings.
The second connotation is Mächtigkeit, the power
of form in existence. It is the inner, actual and cen-
tered power of beings. In human being, it is the
personal power. The third connotation is Macht. It
is a social power. Macht does not refer to a natural
center in which Mächtigkeit utters to an individual.
Instead, Macht is established through a creation of
non-natural centers of leadership. It is a power of
social position which is determined by a group of
people.
Tillich’s Delineation of His Idea of Demonic
20
Tillich talks about his idea of the demonic with his
discussions of Asiatic3 and Occidental4 arts but this
idea is equally inspirational for social analysis.5 Til-
lich once said that even his all other writings are
unavoidably burnt away, those which are con-
cerned with his idea of the demonic must be pre-
served.6 Before moving on to explicate Tillich’s
idea of the demonic, I need to make two remarks.
First, my proposal of using Tillich’s idea of the de-
monic is not dealing with a metaphysical problem
of whether there is a potential of the demonic pre-
sent in God. There are several works discussing
this.7 What I am embarking is an attempt to under-
stand what human beings are experiencing; Sec-
ond, I am not saying fascism is identical to Tillich’s
concept of the demonic. I am trying to use this
concept as a lens to utter a theological understand-
ing of and respond to fascism. This lens would give
us a much inspirational vision for viewing symbol-
ically stage(s) before fascism is maturely formed
but not fascism once we can name it. This will be
talked more about in the following.
How does Tillich delineate the idea of the de-
monic? First, the demonic power can be under-
stood as Kraft. It is formless but it rushes into the
world by acquiring forms. For this reason, the de-
monic has both the destructive and the creative
features as the form of this world is a structure of
creativity according to Tillich. This implies two
things. First, for Tillich the Demonic is different
from the Satanic. The Satanic is described by him
as negative principle operated in the Demonic but
the Demonic has both creative and destructive
strength in which Tillich describes as a dialectical
depth.8 Second, the existence of the demonic de-
pends on the creative. The negativity cannot live
without the positivity which the demonic intends
to distort.9 Nevertheless, the telos, the purpose of
the demonic is to destroy the form it once existen-
tially had. The demonic aims at destroying form by
acquiring form. The consequence is its existential
self-destruction.
The second delineation of Tillich’s concept of
demonic is its self-elevation to infinity and the ab-
solute. While life has a self-transcendent tendency,
the demonic has distorted self-transcendence be-
cause it sees the finite as infinite. It is idolatry from
Tillich’s perspective. Furthermore, the demonic is
a structure of evil rather than individual acts of
evil.10 The demonic structure possesses someone.
It can become a faith demanding people to be will-
ing to sacrifice anything or totally surrender.11
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Therefore, the centeredness of individual being is
removed. The Mächtigkeit is undermined.
Tillich’s Idea of the Demonic as a Lens for
Viewing Fascism
How can these two delineations of Tillich’s idea of
the demonic act as a lens for understanding fas-
cism? First, many critics wonder why fascism can-
not be eradicated, especially in Europe after the
Second World War, particularly when we consider
that European people already have had their tragic
and heavy history and learnings in hand. Tillich’s
idea of the demonic gives us an inspiration for un-
derstanding here. It seems that it is not fascism op-
erates itself but the demonic power which “lies be-
hind” fascism. The telos of the demonic causes the
destruction of the form of fascism during the Sec-
ond World War. Nevertheless, the demonic is not
eradicated. It just “lingers” around without form.
It remains a formless Kraft. However, it breaks into
the world again and takes another form to exist. It
seems that fascism just “transforms” and it is diffi-
cult to be recognized by our experience.
Fascism is originated from an Italian word fascio
which means “a bundle”. There must be some
seemingly reasonable reasons so that people are
grouped together. Hence, my second point is that
these reasons cannot be easily said as entirely bad
or evil. For example, the preliminary stage of fas-
cism is often a stage of recession of a nation and
people may just want to regain vitality. This is ex-
emplified by the situation of Germany after the
First World War. The longing for vitality is the
longing for establishing individual Mächtigkeit and
social Macht. This is the creative strength of the de-
monic. This is the reason why in my second remark
before introducing Tillich’s idea of the demonic, I
said that it is better to use Tillich’s idea of the de-
monic to view the condition of or stage(s) before
fascism is maturely formed, because once fascism
is mature so that we can name it, the Satanic of fas-
cism can be identified and the halo or the creativity
of fascism will have been weakened. The demonic
may not be so “demonic” any more. Anyway, this
creativity is “attractive temptation”. In the book
The Courage to be, Tillich asserts that the considera-
tion of “vitality” must be accompanied by the con-
sideration of “intentionality” and “intentionality”
means “being directed toward meaningful con-
tents” which is “valid logically, esthetically, ethi-
cally, religiously.”12
21
Finally, “a bundle” means one is bound. This
may be conscious or unconscious. As I mentioned
before, fascism can have religious substance. Peo-
ple of fascism is “grasped” unconditionally. Reli-
gious symbols may be found in this process. For
example, the slogan of “blood and soil” used by
Nazi Party. This is what seen by Tillich in his The
Socialist Decision as “myth of origin” which is a po-
litical romanticism possessing people.13
Strength and Weakness of using Tillich’s Idea
of Demonic for Viewing Fascism
As we may see, Tillich’s idea of the demonic has a
strong explanatory power. It utters a possible ex-
planation for the impossibility of the eradication of
fascism. It probably can answer why fascism is at-
tractive though it has a notorious label. The self-
elevation of the demonic to infinity also explains
why people are fascinated and grasped by fascism.
This explanatory power allows people to identify
and expose the demonic and then combat it. It also
avoids people from falling into the pitfall of quick
and easy moral judgment, as the demonic is an evil
of structure and ambiguous in nature. However,
because Tillich’s idea of the demonic is reflective
and circumspect, it causes a difficulty in praxis.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian of Tillich’s time,
wrote something about Tillich in his prison cell:
“The world unseated him (i.e., Tillich) and went on
by itself: he (Tillich) too sought to understand the
world better than it understood itself, but it felt en-
tirely misunderstood, and rejected the imputa-
tion.”14
“Kingdom of God” and “The Spiritual
Presence”
Employing Tillich’s idea of demonic should be ac-
companied by a study of Tillich’s two religious
symbols, the “Kingdom of God” and the “Spiritual
Presence,” which I think many scholars neglect to
do so. It is understandable as many scholars focus
their study of Tillich’s idea of power from an on-
tological perspective because it is the ontological
angle that Tillich uses for his analysis of power in
his book Love, Power and Justice,15 which explicitly
discusses power. However, I argue that we must
not forget that Tillich is, after all a theologian and
so we should also look deep into his religious sym-
bols and use a religious or theological lens to study
his idea of power. A set of religious symbols should
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
be employed for combating the demonic power
because the demonic itself is a religious symbol.
For Tillich, symbol points beyond itself yet itself
participates in this world.16 I have mentioned be-
fore, the demonic has possessing power. If we do
not use symbol but something that is only concrete
and taken from the ordinary experience,17 we are
running into a risk of strengthening the structure
of the demonic unconsciously.18 One should use
another set of religious symbols for the confronta-
tion with the demonic because it is a struggle be-
yond the religious symbols.
So, how can the symbols of the “Kingdom of
God” and the “Spiritual Presence” be employed
for combating the demonic? First, the “Kingdom
of God” is an eschatological symbol. It hints that a
critical distance is needed for removing any ambi-
guity. Whether the creativity belongs to the de-
monic or the divine, we need a retrospective per-
spective for a complete acquirement; Second, the
connotation of “Kingdom of God” is political.19
The word “Kingdom” refers to the sovereignty. It
is talking about the supremacy of God.20 There-
fore, any claim of the absolute and unconditional
demand is shattered by this religious symbol. The
possessing power of fascism is always in struggle
with “Kingdom of God; Third, the scope of
“Kingdom” is broader than the church. Employing
the word “Kingdom” implies that the church, at
certain times, may fail in giving evidence of the di-
vine. The demonic of fascism may be found in the
church. Nevertheless, “Kingdom of God” is not
conquered. “Kingdom of God” prevents the
church from seeing itself as the absolute. For Til-
lich, one criteria for “Kingdom of God” is the
recognition of human dignity, as every human is
potentially a child of God.21
The struggle between the demonic and the di-
vine can be viewed as a struggle of grasping people.
The significance of “The Spiritual Presence” is to
open someone to the divine and then be grasped
by the Spirt. The word “Spiritual” means that there
is freedom of the Spirit to resist any exclusive and
fanatical claim of the divine by human being. The
word “Presence” implies that “in the presence of
God no man (sic.) can boast about his (sic.) grasp
of God.”22 However, for Tillich the word “Pres-
ence” also implies one is aware of the divine “in
spite of the infinite gap between the divine Spirit
and the human spirit.” It is a “courageous stand-
ing.”23 Tillich once vividly illustrates this paradox
in one of his sermons. He said that the Spirit is like
22
the absent God hiding from human’s sight. It is like
an empty space left by someone. It is empty but we
know that it belongs to someone. The Spirit is ab-
sent, yet, we are aware of its presence.24
Still, there are some criteria for the presence of
the Spirit. For Tillich, one of them is love. Besides
faith, love is another impact and manifestation of
“the Spiritual Presence.”25 Love is the reunion of
the separated for Tillich. The demonic demands
someone to sacrifice everything for it. Neverthe-
less, love would not do so. It is a “reunion of the
separated in all dimensions, including that of the
spirit, and not as an act of negation of all dimen-
sions for the sake of a transcendence without di-
mensions.”26
Implications for Some Aspects of the World
Politics Today
It may be still early and, in Tillich’s sense, difficult
to name fascism or nationalism when we consider
the world politics today. Nevertheless, we can get
some theological stimulations through the lenses
of Tillich’s idea of the demonic and his related re-
ligious symbols. I am here to raise several questions
which are derived from this paper and by which
may lead us to think further for some aspects of
today’s world politics: Politicians are puzzled about
the collapse of liberalism and the rise of populism,
particularly in Europe. Can we have a less obscure
vision by using the lens of Tillich’s idea of the de-
monic? The leaders of several countries with
strong and peculiar images are coming onto the
stage in recent years. Besides their charisma, what
are the other things that are deeply grasping peo-
ple? Are these things embedded with religious sub-
stances? Are they used by the leaders for political
“sanctification”? How can we utter the relevant
theological response? Would it be risky if we utter
a theological response too easily and quickly? But
then, does it mean that we have nothing to do right
now? In Tillich’s term, how can “The Spiritual
Community” respond to the situation of today’s
world politics through the power of the Spirit?
How do the “Kingdom of God” and “The Spiritual
Presence” become valuable if we view the world
situation today through the lens of religious sym-
bol?
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Conclusion
I first clarify the ambiguous connotation of
“power” in Tillich’s writings in this paper. Then I
explicate his idea of the demonic based on these
different meanings of power. The nuanced rela-
tionships between Kraft, Mächtigkeit and Macht are
also spotted. Afterward, I explain how Tillich’s idea
of the demonic can act as a lens for us to theolog-
ically understand and respond to fascism. At the
same time, I show how this lens has its both short-
coming and strength. I further show that why stud-
ying Tillich’s idea of the demonic should be accom-
panied by the study of his two religious symbols,
the “Kingdom of God” and the “Spiritual Pres-
ence”. Finally, I raise some questions for the reader
to further reflect on some aspects of the world pol-
itics today.
Bibliograhy
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison.
New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Jr., H. Frederick Reisz. “The Demonic as a Princi-
ple in Tillich’s Doctrine of God”. Theonomy and
Autonomy: Studies in Paul Tillich’s Engagement with
Modern Culture. Edited. by John Carey. Macon:
Mercer University Press, 1984.
Mallow, Vernon. The Demonic: A Selected Theological
Study: An Examination into the Theology of Edwin
Lewis, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich. Laham: Uni-
versity Press of America, 1983.
Pasewark, Kyle. A Theology of Power: Being Beyond
Domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
1 The original version of this paper is presented by
the author in the “Tillich Session: Issues in Theology,
Religion, and Culture Unit” in the 2017 Annual Meet-
ing of American Academy of Religion which was held
in Boston, U.S.A. This version is later edited by the
author.
2 Kyle Pasewark, A Theology of Power: Being Beyond
Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 272-
286.
3 Paul Tillich, “The Demonic: A Contribution to
the Interpretation of History” (trans. Elsa L. Talmey)
in The Interpretation of History (New York: Scribners,
1936), 77-122.
4 Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture, ed. by John
Dillengberger and Jane Dillenberger (New York:
Crossroad, 1987), 102-118.
23
Pauck, Wilhelm and Pauck, Marion. Paul Tillich: His
Life and Though. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1976.
Schüssler, Werner. Dilixi: Shengming De Quanshizhe
(Paul Tililch: Interpret Des Lebens). Kaifeng: He-
nan University, 2011.
Tillich, Paul. Advanced Problem of Systematic Theology:
Courses at Union Theological Seminary, New York,
1936-1938. Edited. by Sturm, Erdmann. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2016
_______. Dynamics of Faith. New York: First
HarperOne, 2009.
_______. Love, Power and Justice: Ontological Analyses
and Ethical Applications. London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1954.
_______. Main Works/Hauptwerke, volume III: Writ-
ings in Social Philosophy and Ethics, ed. by Erd-
mann Sturm. New York: de Gruyter, 1998.
________. On Art and Architecture. Edited by John
Dillengberger and Jane Dillenberger. New
York: Crossroad, 1987.
________.Systematic Theology, Volume III. Chicago:
The University of Chicago.
_________. The Courage to Be, 3rd ed. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2014.
_________. The Eternal Now. London: SCM Press,
2002.
_________. The Interpretation of History. Translated
by. Nicholas A. Rasetzki and Elsa L. Talmey.
New York: Scribners, 1936.
_________. The Socialist Decision. Translated by
Franklin Sherman. Reprint Edition. Eugene:
Wipf & Stock, 2012.
Yip, Francis Ching-Wah. Capitalism as Religion? A
Study of Paul Tillich’s Interpretation of Modernity.
Cambridge: Havard Divinity School, 2010.
5 For example, Francis Ching-Wah Yip uses Til-
lich’s concept of the demonic to understand the religi-
osity of captialism. See Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Capi-
talism as Religion? A Study of Paul Tillich’s Interpretation of
Modernity (Cambridge: Havard Divinity School, 2010),
31-53.
6 Werner Schüssler, Dilixi: Shengming De
Quanshizhe (Paul Tililch: Interpret Des Lebens) (Kai-
feng: Henan University, 2011), 113.
7 For example, Vernon Mallow, The Demonic: A
Selected Theological Study: An Examination into the
Theology of Edwin Lewis, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich
(Laham: University Press of America, 1983), 101-150;
Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and
Though (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1976); H. Frederick
Reisz. Jr., “The Demonic as a Principle in Tillich’s
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Doctrine of God” in Theonomy and Autonomy: Stud-
ies in Paul Tillich’s Engagement with Modern Culture,
ed. by John Carey (Macon: Mercer University Press,
1984), 135-156.
8 Paul Tillich, Advanced Problem of Systematic
Theology: Courses at Union Theological Seminary,
New York, 1936-1938, ed. by Sturm, Erdmann (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2016), 253. and “The Demonic” in The
Interpretation of History (C. Scribner's sons, 1936)
9 Paul Tillich, “The Demonic in Art” in On Art
and Architecture, ed. by John Dillenberger (New York :
Crossroad, 1987), 109.
10 Ibid., 107.
11 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: First
HarperOne, 2009), 1-4.
12 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 3rd ed. (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 2014), 75.
13 Paul Tillich, trans. by Franklin Sherman, The So-
cialist Decision, reprint ed. (Eugene: Wipf & Stock,
2012), 13-26.
14 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New
York: Macmillan, 1965) 108f.
15 Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice: Ontologi-
cal Analyses and Ethical Applications (London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1954).
16 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: First
HarperOne, 2009), 47-48.
Tillich on the Dynamics of the
Divine Life: Evasive or Earnest
Marc A. Pugliese
Introduction
A prima facie ambiguity exists in Tillich’s lan-
guage of the dynamics of the Divine Life vis-à-vis
his statements on the symbolic nature of religious
assertions. This raises questions about Tillich’s ear-
nestness and leads to the practically deleterious
conclusion that the world does not ultimately mat-
ter for God. Is Tillich’s language of the dynamics
of the divine life earnest? Does the world really
matter for God in Tillich’s theology? The diamet-
rically opposed answers to these questions at once
constitute a dialectic of negation and affirmation
fitting to their subject and leave one with the im-
pression that no satisfying answer is possible.
24
17 Tillich differentiates two elements of the reli-
gious symbol. They are “element of ultimacy, which is
a matter of immediate experience and not symbol it-
self, and the element of concreteness, which is taken
from our ordinary experience and symbolically applied
to God.” Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York:
First HarperOne, 2009), 53.
18 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago), 103.
19 Ibid., 358.
20 Paul Tillich, Main Works/Hauptwerke, volume III:
Writings in Social Philosophy and Ethics, ed. by Erdmann
Sturm, (New York: de Gruyter; Berlin: Evangelisches
Verlagswerk, 1998), 433
21 Paul Tillich, Advanced Problem of Systematic
Theology: Courses at Union Theological Seminary,
New York, 1936-1938, ed. by Sturm, Erdmann (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2016), 271
22 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago), 245.
23 Ibid., 133.
24 Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (London: SCM
Press, 2002), 58.
25 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago), 129-138.
26 Ibid., 243-244.
________________________
Tillich and Process Thought
One way to approach these questions is
through the lens of the encounter between Tillich
and process-relational thinkers. This encounter is
nothing new, as pioneers of process-relational the-
ology engaged Tillich while Tillich engaged them,
1
and this interaction has perdured. Although the
2
strands of mutual critique are more pronounced
than those of agreement, the number of similarities
identified is neither small nor insignificant.
This comes to the fore in comparing White-
head and Tillich. Just a few examples include how
3
both insist that we speak of “becoming” when we
speak of “being” and take seriously the creative
4
process by which things come to be (1.200). Both
eschew classical “essentialist” ontology while af-
firming an ontology of actuality where all existence
refers to a free decision (3.398), and where “aims”
5
make being ineluctably telic (1.263–64). They both
oppose the subject–object dichotomy and reject
mind–matter dualism (1.261, 277–78, 281; 3.12, 14,
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
21-22, 26, 28, 113-14, 408, 412–13, 417). The po-
larities of Tillich’s ontological elements—individu-
ation and participation, dynamics and form, and
freedom and destiny—have their corollaries in
Whitehead, while analogues to Whitehead’s doc-
trines of panexperientialism and internal relations
can be found in Tillich (3.409).
Both critique classical theism—including God
as actus purus—and set forth what they judge to be
a more philosophically and religiously adequate
view of God. Both aver that God and creatures
6
transcend each other in mutual freedom (1.158,
1.263). Likewise, both see God as driving every
7
creature toward individual fulfilment through a
sort of “lure” in a value-creating process (1.9, 264,
267, 283, 3.422). Tillich’s Logos, in which the uni-
verse of essence is given “the ‘immanence of crea-
tive potentiality’ in the divine ground of Being”
(3.421–22) can be compared to Whiteheadian en-
visagement of eternal objects in God’s primordial
nature, just as the Whiteheadian consequent nature
of God can be compared to Tillich on essentializa-
tion, or the “elevation of the temporal into the eter-
nal” (3.396–98). 8
Ambiguity
Tillich’s apparently conflicting statements on
God do raise doubts, though. On the one hand, he
says much about the dynamics of the “Divine
Life,” which entails life’s “reunion of otherness
with identity in an eternal ‘process’” (3.284; cf.
1.270, 3.420). The polar opposites of the ontolog-
9
ical elements—like dynamics and form—are pred-
icated of God (1.156–57, 1.179–80, 1.226; 1.231,
1.245–46), which makes God a “living God.” God
10
includes temporality and relation to the modes of
time (1.274, 3:418; cf. 1.257, 3.314), has an “out-
going character,” “participates in history,” “has
community with” everything that is and “shares its
destiny (1.245–46). He says the “world process
means something for God” (3.422), the temporal
becomes “eternal memory” in a “continual pro-
cess” (3.399), and “life in creation contributes in
every moment to the Kingdom of God and its eter-
nal life” (3.398). Tillich even says God participates
“in the negativities of existence” (1.270) and “takes
the suffering of the world upon himself” (2.175).
On the other hand, he states that God is being-
itself (1.235, 1.262, 1.272–73), not a being or entity,
25
and therefore not subject to the ontological struc-
tures (1.235, 1.238–39). The categories of being ap-
ply to God symbolically, not literally (1.247, 3.314–
15), and God in no way depends on any finite be-
11
ing (1.248). Hence, God is not related to the
12
world, does not experience change, and is sub-
jected to neither temporal process nor the structure
of finitude (1.238–239, 1.244, 1.271–72; 2.77;
3.404, 3.420).
Criticisms of Tillich by Process Thinkers
These affirmations and denials have led to di-
vergent assessments of Tillich’s doctrine of God.
Some appeal to the former as evidence of real sim-
ilarities between Tillich and process-relational
thought. Others point to Tillich’s caveats, qualifi-
13
cations, and talk of symbolic language as evidence
that the negations at last win the day so that Tillich
is not earnest in speaking of the dynamics of the
life to God and God’s relationship to the world. 14
For example, Hartshorne lauds what he sees as
similarities between Tillich and process-relational
theology, acclaiming Tillich as a dipolar theist and
15
panentheist. But he immediately goes on to say,
“[t]his interpretation is not without its difficul-
ties.” Many of Hartshorne’s difficulties revolve
16
around language. He states:
It seems Tillich must be with us in all this, but
his language keeps making concessions to
those who are not with us. He allows all sorts
of dipolar terms, but denies that they mean
what they say 17
Sometimes Hartshorne is reserved, saying Til-
lich is not always “quite as clear and coherent as
one could wish.” At other times he calls Tillich’s
18
thinking irrational, incoherent, and in “pure defi-
ance of logic.” Even “being-itself” is an “illogical
19
thing,” for Hartshorne.
20
Similarly, Schubert Ogden says that Tillich’s re-
striction of literal assertions about God to state-
ments like “God is being-itself” means that, for Til-
lich, God is literally nonrelative and changeless. 21
According to Ogden, Tillich still really assumes
with classical theism that the “fundamental con-
cept in terms of which God must be conceived is
that of absolute, unchanging, ‘being’.” 22
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Tillich on Symbols and Symbolic Language
Is Tillich incoherent? Is his talk of the dynam-
ics of the divine life ultimately empty? Is he essen-
tially a classical theist? In seeking answers, we must
first attend more carefully to what Tillich really
means by symbolic assertions. Despite his concern
with semantic rationality (1.55) and verbal exacti-
tude, this is not necessarily immediately clear. In a
special edition of the Journal of Religion dedicated to
Tillich and published at the end of his life, Tillich
23
admits that at times for the sake of abbreviation
and emphasis he blurred what he holds to be the
sharp distinctions between “religious,” “ontologi-
cal,” and “theological” assertions. Accordingly, he
24
is grateful for and readily accepts Robert Scharle-
mann’s formulation that: “Religious assertions are
symbolic (referring to the depth of being), ontolog-
ical assertions are literal (referring to the structure
of being), and theological assertions are literal de-
scriptions of the correlation between the religious
symbols and the ontological concepts.”
25 26
Tillich’s theory of religious symbols and his un-
derstanding of symbolic language are intercon-
nected (2.10). This is seen in how he uses similar
terms to describe both. This also means that what
he says about one has implications for the other.
Tillich’s thinking on religious symbolism un-
derwent development and employs multiple theo-
ries. In his response to Lewis Ford in the same spe-
cial edition noted above, Tillich agrees with Ford's
identification of three general theories of religious
symbolism in his works: (1) the dialectic of nega-
tion and affirmation; (2) the use of the metaphor
of “transparency”; and, (3) the theory of symbolic
participation. With Ford, Tillich judges the theory
of affirmation and negation to be fundamental and
the other two are auxiliary. Each, however, reveals
27
important points about the reality of what is con-
veyed in symbolic assertions.
The dialectic of negation and affirmation
means that “Every religious symbol negates itself
in its literal meaning, but affirms itself in its self-
transcending meaning” (2.9). This dialectic with
entitative religious symbols has implications for
symbolic language. Hence, Tillich also says that in
any concrete symbolic assertion about God the
segment of finite reality being used is negated and
affirmed at the same time (1.239). Regarding the
categories and ontological elements like dynamics
26
and form, specifically, he says: “On the creaturely
level, ontological elements and categories are appli-
cable in a proper and literal sense. On the level of
God’s relation to the creature, the categories are af-
firmed and negated at the same time” (1.286).
In his reply to Hartshorne, Tillich explains that
because God is being-itself, the essential structure
of being must be rooted in God and the categories
are perfectly actualized in God. However, this per-
fect actualization is at the same time their negation
as polar or qualitatively distinct categories. The
28
“way of eminence” (via eminentiae) must be balanced
with the “way of negation” (via negationis), and the
unity of both is the “symbolic way” (via symbolica).
He uses the example that if we say God has per-
sonality in an eminent or absolutely perfect way we
must immediately add that this very assertion im-
plies the negation of personality in the sense of
“being a person.” Both statements together affirm
the symbolic character of the attribute “personal”
for God. Similarly, in speaking of the presence of
time and change in the eternal unity of the Divine
Life, he states: “[W] need two polar assertions
above which lies the truth, which, however, we are
unable to express positively and directly” (3.418).
Using Robert Scharlemann’s careful distinc-
tions, we may say that as theology describes the
correlation between the ontological elements and
categories on the one hand and the religious sym-
bol “God” on the other, the literal assertions about
the structure of (categorical) being made in the cat-
egories and elements are negated, giving way to ex-
istential affirmation that cannot be expressed di-
rectly and properly, that is, non-symbolically. 29
Another example is how Tillich notes that
“predestination” involves the category of causality
and the ontological elements of freedom and des-
tiny. These literal meanings are negated but their
symbolic sense points to the “existential experience
that, in relation to God, God’s act always precedes
and further, that, in order to be certain of one’s ful-
filment one can and must look to God’s activity
alone” (1.286). Here, as theology deals with its ob-
ject of what concerns us ultimately—that which is
a matter of being or not-being for us (1.12, 1.14)—
the ontological elements and categories or “forms
of finitude”—space and time, causality and sub-
stance—become symbols expressing the existential
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
question implied in finite being, the question of be-
ing-itself embracing and conquering nonbeing
(1.209).
Similarly, in treating the symbol of divine om-
nipotence, Tillich distinguishes between the “reli-
gious meaning” of omnipotence and expressing
this “theologically.” The “religious meaning” of
omnipotence is the expression of the Christian
consciousness that the anxiety of nonbeing is eter-
nally overcome in the divine life, which is the first
and basic answer to the question implied in
finitude.” In correlating this religious symbol to the
literal ontological concepts, the “theological ex-
pression” of omnipotence negates the concept of
the ability to do “whatever one wants,” because
this makes God a being alongside of others who
asks about numerous possibilities to actualize. This
subjects God to the potentiality–actuality split,
which is the “heritage of finitude.” Rather, in the-
ological expression omnipotence means the power
of being that resists nonbeing in all its expressions
and which is manifest in the creative process in all
its forms” (1.273). 30
Correspondingly, the dialectic of negation and
affirmation is also bound up with the existential
transcendence of the subject-object bifurcation.
Thus, if we speak of God as (externally) related to
creatures this statement is symbolic. Every affirma-
tion whereby God becomes an object to a subject,
in knowledge or in action, must be affirmed and
denied at the same time. It must be affirmed be-
cause human beings are centered selves to whom
every relation involves an object. However, it must
be denied because God can never become an ob-
ject of knowledge or action (1.271). 31
Before leaving negation and affirmation, we
note the important point that Tillich speaks of a
correlation between religious symbols and the onto-
logical concepts. At one point he describes this cor-
relation as akin to the correspondence of different
series of data in statistical charts (1.60). Such a cor-
respondence involves a real relationship.
Although ancillary compared to negation and
affirmation, the metaphor of transparency for sym-
bolism and the theory of symbolic participation
also bear upon how symbolic statements about
God are not vacant but rather point to something
real.
In his exchange with Ford, Tillich says he
would replace the metaphor of “transparency”
27
with that of “translucence” because “transparency”
negates the symbolic medium too completely. Us-
ing the image of a stained-glass window, Tillich
says the metaphor of “translucence” points to how
the symbolic medium is not utterly passive but
does contribute something of its own. 32
Symbolic participation means the symbol “par-
ticipates in” the symbolized reality that it “opens”
(1.177, 1.239, 2.9). Here, too, the symbol plays an
33
active role as it “opens up levels of being and
meaning” otherwise closed. Tillich clearly states
34
that symbolic participation is possible only if there
is at least some point of identity. The “direct, im-
35
mediate, non-symbolic nature” of symbols must
have an original affinity with the symbolic content
that they represent. 36
Being-Itself
Thus, a closer examination of Tillich’s various
descriptions of religious symbols and symbolic
statements, along with specific examples, reveals
that symbolic statements about God do point to
something real, for Tillich.
What about Tillich’s claim that the statement
“God is being-itself (Überseiende, or esse ipsum
[1.230])” is non-symbolic (1.238)? Does this indi-
cate God is “literally” nonrelative, changeless, and
absolute? Does it include fundamentally classical
theistic conceptions? Here, misunderstanding what
he means by “being-itself” and reading more into
this term than Tillich intends leads to confusion
and unjustified criticism.
Tillich expresses suspicion that much criticism
of the completely abstract statement “God is being-
37
itself” results from confusing being in the absolute
sense of the negation of non-being with a particular
element of being like the stasis as opposed to change,
or the objective as opposed to the subjective. He
expressly says that he means being in this absolute
sense of “not-not-being,” not a particular element
of being, but his critics conflate the two.
38
This absolute sense of “being-itself” simply
means the “absolutely first” and underivable fact
that there is something rather than nothing. This is
the Urtatsache—the “original fact.” The “power” of
being-itself means only one thing: “the degree to
which a reality is able to conquer non-being.” Eve-39
rything—flux as well as stasis, dynamics as well as
form, subjectivity as well as objectivity—is implied
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
in “being” in this sense of absolute prius. Those 40
who have experienced the “shock of non-being”
cannot make any concession on this point about
the ultimacy of being. 41
Referring once again to Scharlemann’s distinc-
tions, the statement “God is being-itself” is a theo-
logical assertion describing the correlation between
the religious symbol “God” and the ontological
concept expressing the “original” and inscrutable
fact that there is something rather than nothing.
The religious symbol “God” here conveys our con-
crete ultimate concern as a matter of being or not-
being for us while “being-itself” is an ontological
concept conveying the literal distinction beings and
the power of Being or simply what it means to be
(i.e., Heidegger’s “ontological difference” between
Seiendes und Sein ). This is why the theological asser-
43
tion “God is being-itself” is synthetic, not analytic
or tautologous.
And Tillich explains that this is only the first,
not the last, theological assertion. It merely answers
the question: “What does it mean that God ‘is’?”
and the answer simply is: “God is not a being.” He
says he has much more to say about God beyond
this, mentioning his longer explications of God as
46
“Life,” God as “Spirit,” and God as related.
What of the non-symbolic nature of this asser-
tion? In his exchange with Hartshorne, Tillich
harkens back to an earlier interaction with William
Urban and Edwin Aubrey in which he realized we
must delimit the symbolic realm with a non-sym-
bolic statement because not doing so would be
self-referential and self-defeating. This is because if
there are absolutely no non-symbolic statements
then even claims about how symbols apply to God
are themselves symbolic and we fall into a circular
argument. Symbolic statements thus assume some
48
basis of non-symbolic knowledge. For this reason,
49
all necessarily symbolic assertions about God can
be made only on the basis of this first non-sym-
bolic assertion about God that God is being-itself
(1.239), after which nothing else can be said about
50
God as God that is not symbolic (1.239). 51
Symbolic Language & Sincerity
We have seen that Tillich’s repeated declara-
tions of a real correlation between symbolic asser-
tions and the object of ultimate concern mean he
is earnest in what he says symbolically about the
28
dynamics of the divine life. Nor can his sincerity be
gainsaid on the basis of his non-symbolic assertion
that “God is ‘being-itself’.”
Many other scattered statements “point to” the
veracity here. He states that “the immediate reality
used in the symbol has something to do with the
transcendent reality which is symbolized in it.” He
52
says when we approach God cognitively through
42
the structural elements of being-itself that make
God a “living God,” these “enable us to use sym-
bols which we are certain point to the ground of
reality” (1.238). Similarly: “If we use the symbol ‘di-
vine life,’ as we certainly must, we imply that there
is an analogy between the basic structure of expe-
rienced life and the Ground of Being in which life
is rooted” (1.156). As early as 1928 he rejected what
he calls “negative theories” of symbolism because
they deny a symbol has an objective referent, giving
it purely subjective significance.53
Although he rejects the literal application to
God of the dynamics side of the dynamics-form
44 pair of ontological elements because this makes
45 God finite and dependent (1.246), Tillich insists
these concepts not be abandoned because they
point symbolically to a quality of the divine life that
47 is analogous to what appears in the ontological
structure. Statements about divine creativity, God’s
participation in history, God’s outgoing character,
and so forth, are based on this dynamic element
(1.246).54
The problems with a non-symbolic doctrine of
God as “becoming” is not becoming per se. It is
that the literal sense of “becoming” implies
finitude (1.246–47), and that becoming as well as
rest, dynamics as well as form, imply being in the
sense of what Tillich means by “being-itself,” as
explained above. Tillich affirms that the symbolic
application of the dynamics-form polarity to the di-
vine life does express the union of possibility with
fulfilment, real potentiality with real actuality, God
going out from God’s self and returning without
ceasing to be God in an eternal rest (1.247): “If we
call God the ‘living God,’ we deny that he is a pure
identity of being as being; and we also deny that
there is a definite separation of being from being in
him. We assert that he is the eternal process in
which separation is posited and is overcome by re-
union. In this sense, God lives” (1.242).
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Eschatology and Essentialization
Tillich’s symbolic statements about the dynam-
ics of the divine life also directly bear on what he
says about how the world really does matter to
God. Perhaps the most puissant affirmations that
the world matters to God for Tillich lie in his es-
chatology. Using what he calls a “bold metaphor,”
he states that in a continuous process the temporal
becomes “eternal memory” (3.399). “Time not
only mirrors eternity; it contributes to Eternal Life
in each of its moments” (3.420). Eternity perma-
nently elevates the finite into itself (3.399) so that
what is positive in the universe becomes an object
of eternal memory (3.400). In this way finitude
“does not cease to be finitude, but it is ‘taken into’
the infinite, the eternal” (3.411). “Nothing with be-
ing is ultimately annihilated. Nothing with Being is
excluded from eternity” (3.399).
This concerns not only created essences apart
from existence. Utilizing Schelling’s notion of “es-
sentialization” as a “conceptual symbol” (3.407),
Tillich affirms that “the new which has been actu-
alized in time and space adds something to essen-
tial being, uniting it with the positive which is cre-
ated in existence, thus producing the ultimately
new” (3.400–1). This participation in “eternal life”
“depends on a creative synthesis of a being’s essen-
tial nature with what it has made of it in its tem-
poral existence (3.401). Although metaphorically
and inadequately expressed, this “gives an infinite
weight to every decision and creation in time and
space” (3.401). Tillich maintains:
What happens in time and space, in the small-
est particle of matter as well as in the greatest per-
sonality, is significant for eternal life. And since
eternal life is participation in the divine life, every
finite happening is significant for God (3.398) . . .
1 See, for example, Bernard Loomer, “Tillich's
Theology of Correlation,” Journal of Religion 36 (1956)
150–56; Charles Hartshorne, “Tillich’s Doctrine of
God,” in The Theology of Paul Tillich, ed. Kegley and
Bretall, 164–95 (New York: Macmillan, 1961); idem,
“Tillich and the Other Great Tradition,” Anglican Theo-
logical Review 43 (1961) 245–59; idem, “Tillich and the
Nontheological Meanings of Theological Terms,” Reli-
gion in Life 35 (1966) 674–85; idem, A Natural Theology
for Our Time (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967) 33–37;
Schubert M. Ogden, “Beyond Supernaturalism,” Reli-
gion in Life 33 (1963–64): 7–18; and idem, The Reality of
29
the world process means something for God
(3.422).
This similarity here to Whitehead’s consequent
nature of God is perhaps one of the most conspic-
uous similarities between Tillich and Whitehead,
and in language that sounds unmistakably White-
headian, Tillich says more about this “cannot be
said—except in poetic imagery” (3.399). 55
Conclusion
In conclusion, disambiguation of the prima facie
ambiguity in Tillich’s language of the dynamics of
the Divine Life vis-à-vis his claims about the sym-
bolic nature of these assertions is indeed possible.
Tillich laments how many get hung up on his first
statement regarding God as “being-itself” that they
stop reading everything else he has to say about
God, and base their criticisms on that small sec-
tion. Reading well beyond this propaedeutic and
56
allowing Tillich himself to determine what he
means reveals that Tillich’s distinctions between
symbolic and literal language cannot be pressed
into service to question the sincerity of his talk of
the dynamics of the Divine Life and how the world
matters for God . A careful examination of Tillich’s
vivid descriptions of the dynamics of the Divine
Life in relation to the world reveal an intention to
affirm something real about God, which his quali-
fications about symbolic language are not designed
to obviate. Tillich is earnest. For Tillich, the world
does “really matter” for God in the robust sense
that Tillich’s critics deny him. If we leave it to Til-
lich himself to determine what he means then we
must conclude that, far from being disingenuous,
Tillich quite really and quite “literally” means what
he says.
God and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row,
1966), 44–54.
2 See, for instance, Donald R. Weisbaker, “Process
Thought in Tillich's Eschatology,” International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion 5(2) (Summer 1974): 91–107;
and Tyron Inbody, “Paul Tillich and Process Theol-
ogy,” Theological Studies 36(3) (1975): 472–92.
3 In seeking reasons for these similarities, one may
perhaps point to relatively proximate shared origins in
two trajectories of German Idealism: Schelling in Til-
lich’s case and Anglo-American Absolute Idealism (a
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
la F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, etc.) in White-
head’s case. On Schelling and Tillich see, for example,
See, John W. Rathbun and Fred Burwick, “Paul Tillich
and the Philosophy of Schelling,” International Philosoph-
ical Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (September 1964): 373–93.
On Hegel, Absolute Idealism, and Whitehead, see,
Robert Ellis, “From Hegel to Whitehead,” The Journal
of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 4 (October 1981): 403–21. At
the beginning of Process and Reality, Whitehead relates:
“Finally, though throughout the main body of the
work I am in sharp disagreement with Bradley, the fi-
nal outcome is after all not so greatly different. . . . In-
deed, if this cosmology be deemed successful, it be-
comes natural at this point to ask whether the type of
thought involved be not a transformation of some
main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a realistic
basis” (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An
Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald
W. Sherburne [New York: Macmillan, 1929; corr. ed.,
New York: Free Press, 1978]), 90–91 [henceforth
“PR”]).
4 “The dynamic character of being implies the ten-
dency of everything to transcend itself and to create
new forms. At the same time everything tends to con-
serve its own form as the basis of its self-transcend-
ence. It tends to unite identity and difference, rest and
movement, conservation and change. Therefore it is
impossible to speak of being without also speaking of
becoming. Becoming is just as genuine in the structure
of being as is what remains unchanged in the process
of becoming. And vice versa, becoming would be im-
possible if nothing were preserved in it as the measure
of change. A process philosophy which sacrifices the
persisting identity of that which is in process sacrifices
the process itself, its continuity, the relation of what is
conditioned to its conditions, the inner aim (telos)
which makes a process a whole. Bergson was right
when he combined the elan vital, the universal tendency
toward self-transcendence, with duration, with conti-
nuity, and self-conservation in the temporal flux”
(Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. [Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1951–63], 1.181). Due to
their frequency, all subsequent references will be by
volume and page number, e.g., “(1.181).” Cf. Paul Til-
lich, “On God and His Attributes,” 376.
5 Tillich and Whitehead both explicitly appeal to
the etymology of the word “decision” to make the
point that decision means the “cutting off” of possibil-
ities (1.152, 1.184n4; cf. 3.220, 398).
6 Tillich writes: “Pure actuality…is not alive. Life
includes the separation of potentiality and actuality.
The nature of life is actualization, not actuality. The
God who is actus purus is not the living God” (1.246).
30
7 Hartshorne calls this a “virtually exact parallel to
Whitehead” (Hartshorne, “Tillich’s Doctrine of God,”
166).
8 Hartshorne comments that “impressive treat-
ment of immortality is probably not far” from the pro-
cess-relational view of our objective immortality in
God (but here Hartshorne distinguishes between “ev-
erlasting” and “eternal” (Hartshorne, “Tillich’s Doc-
trine of God,” 174).
9 On the basis of the dynamic ontological element,
Tillich predicates to God the dialectics of life, which
involve the movement of separation and union. “If we
call God the ‘living God,’ we deny that he is a pure
identity of being as being; and we also deny that there
is a definite separation of being from being in him. We
assert that he is the ternal process in which separation
is posited and is overcome by reunion. In this sense,
God lives” (1.242). According to Tillich, the three
functions of life are: (1) self-integration; (2) self-crea-
tion; (3) Self-transcending to God, (3.30–32; cf. 3.96).
Thus, for Tillich, God has the character of all life in
that God goes beyond God’s self and returns to God’s
self (2.90). In a way analogous to the Neoplatonic exi-
tus–reditus, there is a separation and return to the divine
self (1.56), and this depends on the dynamic element:
“The divine creativity, God’s participation in history,
his outgoing character, are based on this dynamic ele-
ment” (1.246).
10 Hartshorne stated that Tillich comes closest to
the dipolar conception of God when Tillich affirms
that “in God the polarities are present but without
‘tension’ or possible ‘dissolution’” (Charles Harts-
horne, “Tillich’s Doctrine of God,” 186). The differ-
ence is that for creatures, the tension in the polarities
of the ontological elements (e.g., 1.199–200) leaves fi-
nite being open to the thread of nonbeing through dis-
solution (1.198). “Within the divine life, every ontolog-
ical element includes its polar element completely,
without tension and without the threat of dissolution
for God is being-itself” (1.241–43 somewhere in
there).
11 “There can be no doubt that any concrete asser-
tion about God must be symbolic, for a concrete as-
sertion is one which uses a segment of finite experi-
ence in order to say something about him” (1.239).
12 This is because “[a] conditioned God is no
God” (1.248).
13See, for instance: Donald R. Weisbaker, “Process
Thought in Tillich's Eschatology,” International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion 5(2) (Summer 1974): 91–107;
Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson, 20th-Century The-
ology: God & the World in a Transitional Age (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 130; and Veli-
Matti Kärkkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 132.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Weisbaker says that Tillich’s caveat about symbolic
language is “not-too-convincing” (Weisbaker, 100).
14 See, for example, Ogden, 55, 158; John B.
Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An
Introductory Exposition (Louisville: Westminster/John
Knox Press, 1976). 51; John B., Cobb, Jr., Living Op-
tions in Protestant Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1962), 281; John Sanders, “Historical Consider-
ations,” in The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the
Traditional Understanding of God, ed., Clark Pinnock,
Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and Da-
vid Basinger, 59–100 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVar-
sity Press, 1994), 92–93; Thomas J. Oord, The Uncon-
trolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of
Providence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015),
95.
15 Hartshorne points to, among other things, how
Tillich correctly says that theology today must deal
with the controversy between classical theism in which
becoming is an inferior order of reality, and the philos-
ophers and theologians of process who say that being,
so far as other than becoming, is a function, aspect or
constituent of the becoming or process that “is reality
itself” (Hartshorne, “Tillich’s Doctrine of God,” 168).
As did the great modern process philosophers (e.g.,
Whitehead, Fechner, Berdyaev), Tillich tries to do jus-
tice to both sides of this controversy (168). Tillich’s re-
mark that what is positive in time is in God implies
that creation, as an ever new synthesis embracing all
that is not new, is in God and the “data” of each syn-
thesis includes whatever is not new through the divine
counterpart of memory, which Tillich allows symboli-
cally (173). Hartshorne points to where Tillich says
something like the process claim that “each actual syn-
thesis is a ‘potential’ for further syntheses” (178). As
has already mentioned above, Hartshorne says that
“[t]he closest Tillich comes, perhaps, to diploarity is in
his doctrine that in God the polarities are present but
without ‘tension’ or possible ‘dissolution’” (Harts-
horne 186). In what he calls a “virtually exact parallel
with Whitehead,” Tillich affirms, with Whitehead, that
God and creatures by their freedom mutually ‘trans-
cend’ each other (166), and that all creatures, not just
humans, have spontaneity and freedom (166, 184) so
that there is no divine determinism (176). For Harts-
horne, Tillich’s “impressive treatment of immortality is
probably not far” from the process-relational view of
our objective immortality in God (but here Hartshorne
distinguishes between “everlasting” and “eternal”
(174).
16 Ibid., 168.
17 Ibid., 177. Inbody makes a similar point: “So
near and yet so far. Tillich has conceded to his process
critics almost everything that possibly could be con-
31
ceded without capitulating to their revisions of classi-
cal theism. Yet in the end his insistence on the priority
of being-itself and his refusal to make any literal state-
ments about God put him in the camp of the classical
theists; indeed, his ‘God beyond God’ makes him a de-
fender of one of the most extreme forms of the tran-
scendence of God in terms of His aseity that classical
theism has ever had” (Inbody, 484).
18 Ibid., 195.
19 Ibid., 177. Tillich’s affirmation and negation of
the categories when applied to God is a similarly
“logic-defying phrase” (ibid., 195).
20 Ibid., 177. Joining a host of others—and not
surprisingly for Hartshorne himself—he criticizes Til-
lich’s denial of literal assertions about God except for
the statement that “God is being-itself” and goes on to
reason that it impossible to give a justification of the
doctrine of nonliteral, symbolic language without argu-
ments that themselves can be taken literally and as
such are cogent (ibid., 195). Others have argued that it
is impossible to avoid other non-symbolic, literal, as-
sertions about God. For instance, couching the discus-
sion in terms univocal, analogical, and equivocal predi-
cation, Robert Neville argues that to say: “all
knowledge of God is symbolic” is to admit some uni-
vocal (i.e., literal) ground for denying univocity (Rob-
ert Cummings Neville, God the Creator [Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1992], 147). This literal ground is Til-
lich’s ontology in which God is being-itself or the
power of being transcending and grounding all deter-
minate structures of finite being. This ontology of be-
ing-itself grounds the claim that all other knowledge of
God is symbolic and is therefore not itself symbolic.
This is problematic because if God does transcend all
determinate structures then the ontology cannot be lit-
eral and really express God’s transcendence (ibid.).
21 Ogden, The Reality of God and Other Essays,
55.
22 Ibid.
23 Tillich notes that the publication of this supple-
ment took place in the time between the end of his
teaching at Chicago and his eightieth birthday (Paul
Tillich, “Rejoinder,” The Journal of Religion 16[1] [Janu-
ary 1966]: 184).
24 Ibid.
25 Ontology discovers concepts that are less uni-
versal than being, but more universal than any concept
dealing with the ontic (in Heidegger’s terminology)
realm of beings (Seiendes). These concepts constitute
what Tillich calls the “structure of being,” which pro-
vides what is needed to represent symbolically both
the nature of the divine life (by the ontological ele-
ments) (1.243; cf. 1.238) and the relation of God to
the creature (by the ontological categories) (1.237).
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
Ontology can state the conceptual truth of God’s na-
ture clearly because God is “the ground of the struc-
ture of beings” and God “is this structure” (1:238–39).
On the one hand, as the Ground of being God is the
ground of the structure of being and therefore is not
subject to that structure. On the other hand, we are in-
escapably bound to the categories of finitude (1.237)
and so can only approach God cognitively and speak
of God through the structural elements of being. The
ontological categories and elements apply in a proper
and literal sense to creatures and symbolically to God
(1.286). Tillich says that the categorical forms appear
implicitly or explicitly in every thought, including
about God” (1.192). With Kant, Tillich maintains
there is no knowledge whatsoever without the catego-
ries. We also note here how Tillich equates ontology
with metaphysics, but opts to use “ontology” because
metaphysics has developed connotations divergent
from its original meaning (1.20).
26 Ibid. We note here how religious assertions are
nonliteral and symbolic, philosophical assertions are
literal and non-symbolic, and theological assertions
combine the literal and the symbolic. Theology is sym-
bolic because it articulates the meaning of religious
symbols.
27 Ibid., 186.
28 He adds “In this sense the classical doctrine that
the divine attributes are identical in God is correct”
(Paul Tillich, “Answer,” in The Theology of Paul Tillich,
ed. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, 329–49
[New York: Macmillan, 1961], 334).
29 When he says the statement “God is ‘being-it-
self’” is a non-symbolic statement he adds that this
means “It does not point beyond itself. It means what
it says directly and properly” (1.238).
30 The non-objectifiable nature of ultimate con-
cern is related to how religious symbols attempt to ex-
press existential experience. Existential awareness is
not a rational, objective, knowledge of a being along-
side of other beings about which there could objective
discussion by a detached subject. Again, religion deals
existentially with being while philosophy deals theoret-
ically with the structure of being (1.230). Religious
knowledge requires maximum participation. “Partici-
pation” here is not intellectual reflection but rather ex-
istential engagement, living interaction. Our ultimate
concern “cannot be discovered by detached observa-
tion or by conclusions derived from such observation.
It can be found only in acts of surrender and participa-
tion” (1.44). Religious language does not enable us to
“gain knowledge of God by drawing conclusions
about the infinite from the finite” but conveys the
meaning of existential participation in God (1.238–40)
31 Tillich says that God always remains a subject
(1.271). German Idealism’s Absolute Subject that is
32
never object has had far-reaching impact on continen-
tal theology—Barth and Tillich both hold this tenet.
32 Tillich, “Rejoinder” 187.
33 Paul Tillich, “Theology and Symbolism,” in Reli-
gious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest Johnson, 107–16([New
York: Harper & Bros., 1955), 109.
34 Paul Tillich, “The Word of God,” in Language:
An Enquiry Into Its Meanings and Function, ed. Ruth
Nands Anshen, 122–33 (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1957), 132; and idem, “Theology and Symbolism,”
109. Religious symbols point to ultimate reality, the
“ground of being,” which is not a level but the creative
ground of all levels. Discursive language cannot open
up ultimate reality, the level of the holy, the ground of
the soul in which the holy is experienced (Tillich, “The
Word of God,” 133).
35 Tillich, “Rejoinder,” 188.
36 Paul Tillich, “Symbol and Knowledge: A Re-
sponse,” Journal of Liberal Religion, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Spring
1941): 204.
37 Every concrete assertion about God must be
symbolic, because a concrete assertion uses a segment
of finite experience to say something about God
(1.239). The statement: “God is being-itself (Über-
seiende, or esse ipsum [1.230])” is non-symbolic (1.238)
but this is the most abstract statement about God.
This is because theology must begin its task by making
explicit the foundation implicit in every religious
thought and expression concerning God, and there-
fore its first statement is the most abstract and unsym-
bolic statement possible (1.239; cf. 1.294). In the state-
ment “God is being-itself,” “God” is the referent of
concrete existential ultimate concern being explicated,
and “being-itself” is a concept. This is why the state-
ment “God is being-itself” is synthetic, not analytic or
tautologous.
38 Tillich, “Rejoinder,” 185.
39 Ibid., 188.
40 Tillich, “Rejoinder,” 185. Being in this sense is
also implied by and therefore prior to becoming,
which is one of Tillich’s criticisms of conceiving God
in terms of a literal process (ibid.).
41 Ibid., 186.
42 The “original fact” that “being is and nonbeing
is not” precedes even reason as its “Ground and
Abyss” (Grund und Abgrund) (1.110). It is “that beyond
which thought cannot go” (1.230).
43 Tillich also calls “being-itself” Überseiende, esse ip-
sum, and the “power of being.”
44 Ibid., 185.
45 “The being of God is being-itself. The being of
God cannot be understood as the existence of a being
alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he
is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to
space and substance” (1.235).
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018
46 Tillich, “Rejoinder,” 184, 186. The “first (not
the last!) statement about God” is “that he is being-it-
self or the ground of being,” and “nothing can be said
about God theologically before the statement is made
that God is the power of being in all being” (3.294).
47 Tillich, “Rejoinder,” 186.
48 For example, the statement that “everything we
say about God is symbolic” must be non-symbolic,
otherwise we fall into a circular argument (2.9). Tillich
adds this in the second volume of Systematic Theology in
response to criticisms to this effect. He says he had al-
ready realized this problem before, through his ex-
change with Urban and Aubrey.
49 Tillich, “Symbol and Knowledge,” 203; System-
atic Theology, 2.9.
50 This regards theological assertions. Religious as-
sertions in contrast to theological assertions, however,
do not require such a foundation” because “the foun-
dation is implicit in every religious thought concerning
God” (1.239).
51 In 2.9 Tillich famously says that “ . . . there is a
point at which a non-symbolic assertion about God
must be made. There is such a point, namely the state-
ment that everything we say about God is symbolic.
Such a statement is an assertion about God which it-
self is not symbolic. Otherwise we would fall into a
circular argument” (2.9). In neither 1.238 nor 2.9 does
he explicitly say that what he sets forth as a non-sym-
bolic statement is the only non-symbolic statement.
Whether the latter is implied is another question. 2.9
may very well be one of Tillich’s many responses to
criticisms of the first volume of Systematic Theology con-
tained in the second volume.
52 Tillich, “Symbol and Knowledge, 203.
33
53 Paul Tillich, “The Religious Symbol,” The Journal
of Liberal Religion, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 1940): 16. The
original version of this essay first appeared in a 1928
issue of Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie. Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Philosophischen Gesellschaft. “Negative theories”
of symbolism are especially dangerous for religious
symbols because religious symbols do not refer to a
world of objects but they do intend to express a reality
beyond the subjectivity of the religious person (ibid.)
54 He explicates this with the example of tempo-
rality: “It includes a ‘not yet’ which is, however, always
balanced by an ‘already” within the divine life. It is not
an absolute ‘not yet,’ which would make it a divine-de-
monic power, nor is the ‘already’ an absolute already.
It also can be expressed as the negative in the process
of being-itself. As such it is the basis of the negative
element in the creature in which it is not overcome but
is effective and a potential disruption” (1.246–47).
55 If Whitehead is correct about how when at-
tempting to formulate metaphysical first principles
language is deficient and words remain “metaphors
mutely appealing for an imaginative leap” (Whitehead,
Process and Reality, 4), if he is right that philosophy is
“the endeavor to find a conventional phraseology for
the vivid suggestiveness of a poet” akin to seeking “to
reduce Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ to prose” (Alfred North
Whitehead, Modes of Thought [New York: Capricorn,
1958], 68–69), then Tillich’s distinctions between sym-
bolic and literal language cannot be pressed into ser-
vice to attenuate his dynamic language about God and
how the world matters for God, let alone dismiss it
out of hand.
56 Tillich, “Rejoinder,” 186.
 Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, vol. 44, no. 2: Spring 2018 34

Officers
The North American
Paul Tillich Society

President
Devan Stahl, College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University

President Elect
Verna Ehret, Mercyhurst University

Vice President
Lawrence A. Whitney, LC† Vice President
Secretary Treasurer
Frederick J. Parrella, Santa Clara University

Past President

Adam Pryor, Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas

Board of Directorsˆ
Term Expiring 2018
Jawanza Clark, Manhattan College
Johanne Stebbe Teglbaerg Kristensen, University of Kopenhagen
Jari Ristiniemi, University of Gävle

Term Expiring 2019

Ted Farris, New York City

Charles Fox, SUNY Empire State College
Ronald Stone, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

Term Expiring 2020

Hannah Hofheinz
Bin Song
Benjamin Chicka